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8:18pm June 19, 2012

➸ Not glad he's dead, but his paintings always creeped me out...

feliscorvus:

youneedacat:

I got that sense from his paintings too. Apparently he wasn’t actually all that technically skilled, either — I mean somewhat, but a lot of artists I know have commented on things that show he really didn’t know what he was doing, and then tried to cover it up by strategic placing of objects in his painting. But yeah there was something about them that wasn’t even art, and I don’t mean that in a snobby way, I mean that in an “ewwwww, this was painted to manipulate people and to hide something seriously sinister, not because of any kind of artistic impulse” way.

Yeah I know exactly what you mean by “wasn’t even art”, and it has nothing to do with snobbishness. I like all kinds of actual art in a variety of different aesthetic styles ranging from very personal/conceptual stuff to hyper-realistic work. And when I like something it’s generally a combination of appreciating the way it looks and also appreciating/perceiving what is coming through in the work. And with Kinkade’s stuff, it’s almost like the stuff coming through makes it impossible to even get a clear sense of what it looks like. Even though I can clearly see the shapes and colors used. There are elements in his paintings that I know I usually like (e.g., old houses and foresty-type places), but somehow it ends up coming across all creepy, and not in a cool “spooky” way.  Because you know he was aiming for non-creepy, and creepy trying to look like the opposite of creepy is even creepier than straightforward creepiness. 

There’s a list of 16 suggestions he gave to people working on his movie (something about a Christmas cottage, I’ve never seen it) here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/11/thomas-kincades-16-guidelines-for-making-stuff-suck

Granted the article itself is a bit snarky but I can see why after reading that list. I mean some of it is pretty straightforward TV-direction stuff, like specifying the type of lighting to use, but even just the way he’s described it is “off” somehow. The last one is especially WTF:

“…Most important concept of all — THE CONCEPT OF LOVE. Perhaps we could make large posters that simply say “Love this movie” and post them about. “


And I just was reading the Wikipedia article on him, and found this quote by Joan Didion:

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

So apparently other people picked up on it hiding something sinister. Which is something, considering how oblivious a lot of people are.

YES. The “Hansel and Gretel” lure-effect thing is exactly what I’ve noticed. Only, again, much creepier than an actual fairy-tale given that the whole point of a lot of those fairy tales was to illustrate dangerous illusions and the stuff that lay underneath them. Whereas Kinkade seemed to be going “no, really! The illusion is the reality!” 

Wikipedia then says (of the same person who said that):

Didion goes on to compare the “Kinkade Glow” to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit.[19] Didion sees “unsettling similarities” between the two painters, and worries that Kinkade’s own treatment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignores the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite’s Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls “an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”

Anyone who could talk about someone romanticizing Donner Pass in the same breath as Kinkade… really gets what I find creepy as hell about his paintings.

Wow, I’d never heard of the Donner Pass painting guy but that comparison totally makes sense.

And yeah — I’m not surprised about it being substance abuse either. Wikipedia says this about that:

The Los Angeles Times has reported that some of Kinkade’s former colleagues, employees, and even collectors of his work say that he had a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers. The Times further reported that he openly groped a woman’s breasts at a South Bend, Indiana sales event, and mentioned his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”[33][34] In a letter to licensed gallery owners acknowledging he may have behaved badly during a stressful time when he overindulged in food and drink, Kinkade said accounts of the alcohol-related incidents included “exaggerated, and in some cases outright fabricated personal accusations.” The letter did not address any incident specifically.[34]

In 2006, John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion (“about six years ago”) Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting “Codpiece! Codpiece!” at the performers. Eventually he was calmed by his mother.[33] Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.”[33] In June 2010, Kinkade was arrested in Carmel, California for driving while under the influence of alcohol. He was convicted.[35][36][8]

I’m not cheering that he’s dead either. But I really, really hope that he doesn’t undergo that weird transformation other people go through when they’re dead. Where, as George in “Dead Like Me” puts it, “You can be the biggest turd in the toilet bowl and still come out smelling like a rose.” That transformation really bugs me and freaks me out with the reality-warpage that always ensues.

Re. substance abuse, I’ve noticed a tendency for people with poor personal boundaries to be attracted to alcohol abuse, which of course only makes things worse. It’s a really nasty feedback loop and it definitely sounds like some of that was going on here. OH and another thing, some articles I read about Kinkade made some comparisons to Andy Warhol, at least in the “art as business” sense. I think Warhol was maybe a wee bit more…I don’t know, statementy about that approach, and somewhat more self-aware in general, but I can actually sort of see something similar under the surface. Even though their work doesn’t really look similar superficially.

Warhol certainly had a lot of dark grey icky stuff under the surface, and so does this guy. I find it really hard to look at Warhol paintings too, they are like a slick shiny cover over something just wrong. (Where Kinkade’s paintings are more like a warm fuzzy cover over something wrong.)