Thomas Kinkade Parodies
I'm fascinated by popular genres and their ability to trigger fresh pictorial ideas. In the past I've used folk art, amateur painting, cartoons-- from comic book icons like Dick Tracy to pornographic caricatures of Mussolini ---vernacular decorations and hand-painted signs (many found on my sojourns to Mexico). A few years back the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, probably the most popular painter of our time (or maybe any time), suggested to me a fruitful stepping off point for a series of landscape paintings that would in some way parody the sweet nostalgic mood and the pseudo- impressionistic style.
The typical Kinkade painting is an over-ripe, crazily dappled affair that manages to combine a ridiculously exaggerated impressionistic light with sudden shifts into the blackest chiaroscuro, the whole image topped off with an inexplicable inner radiance that the artist might have picked up from the late-19th century symbolists. This inner glow, to Kinkade, was what made his paintings "spiritual," an idea happily bought into by millions of his religiously prone buyers and fans.
In any case, it seemed to me to be rich material for aesthetic transformation. At first, under a natural impulse to mock this unabashed nose-dive into kitsch that was Kinkade's painting. I thought I could make hilarious paintings that made Hallmarkian mawkishness interesting. I did indeed get some Hallmark notes in such pieces as The Four Sessions, in one version a painted over compilation of Kinkade winter scenes (complete with inquisitive deer peering at a bright cottage in the snow). Finally though, I opted for a combining and abstracting approach enlivened by details --sometimes actual quotes-- from Kinkade's rich arsenal of corny effects. In this way I was able to merge Kinkade motifs with my own organizing principles. I would take a typical glowing cottage and re-paint it, altering shapes, color and composition or juxtapose it with such unrelated things as a Cezanne group of trees or a Winslow Homer rooster in a courtyard. I would pull out a single Kinkadian element --a bridge, a stone walkway, some fluff of spring foliage-- and place it in a new context, painterly or digital. I also felt free to add outside stylistic interpretations --like the splotchy pointillistic frame of Night Bridge With Orange Surround (above) oil on canvas, 2013. In the more literal pieces, I printed out a slew of Kinkade landscapes and then made a composition out of them by cutting, joining and pasting the divergent scenes. A ten-foot-high version of The Four Seasons --a kind f a totem picture puzzle-- was made this way with nary a brushstroke added.
Kinkade called himself, in a trademarked phrase no less, "The Painter of Light" (or "lite," as would be more appropriate). Monet might have had a few choice words to say about this designation, but poor Kinkade evidently was unaware the exclusiveness that the definite article "the" proclaimed. Or then again, maybe he was totally aware that by calling himself THE Painter of Light instead of just A Painter of Light that it would help propel him into phenomenal commercial success. The phrase, for whatever reason, made me think of Seurat, and then Roy Lichtenstein. I had done riffs on Lichtenstein's ben-day dot paintings previously, and I sought a way to use them as patterns that would simultaneously over-ride and enliven Kinkade's bland surfaces. In a few pieces the Kinkade cottage was invaded by just such a pattern of painterly dots (nothing like the neat, mechanical dots of Lichtenstein). In Christmas Vignette I and 2, (oil on canvas, 2013) the mesh of dots becomes a surrogate atmosphere pulsating around a very loosely brushed cottage.
Other times I looked for some way to find formal clarity in Kinkade's murkily constructed world. Flood With Big Floating Roof, for example, displays a sharp realism that, with its odd spatial arrangement, is tinged with a surrealistic feel. The idea to plant some natural disaster, like this flood, within these unflaggingly bucolic scenes was a constant temptation. I fully gave in with the "lightning strike" pictures (Attractive Cottage and Lightning Strike With Rooster are examples) and the deluges that threaten to swamp those picturesque bridges. Maybe I show a bit too much glee in my enthusiastic dive into bathos in these works, It was always my plan to derail Kinkade's happy, languid aesthetic, but I never intended to be mean- spirited about it. I hope I haven't been: Kinkade is just too easy a target. And then his unexpected death at 54 in 2013 made me even more aware that plain, unadulterated mockery would, at this point, produce nothing more than a wan, rasping voice. I prefer to let my cynicism about such work as Kinkade's keep a low, under-the-radar presence.
The typical Kinkade painting is an over-ripe, crazily dappled affair that manages to combine a ridiculously exaggerated impressionistic light with sudden shifts into the blackest chiaroscuro, the whole image topped off with an inexplicable inner radiance that the artist might have picked up from the late-19th century symbolists. This inner glow, to Kinkade, was what made his paintings "spiritual," an idea happily bought into by millions of his religiously prone buyers and fans.
In any case, it seemed to me to be rich material for aesthetic transformation. At first, under a natural impulse to mock this unabashed nose-dive into kitsch that was Kinkade's painting. I thought I could make hilarious paintings that made Hallmarkian mawkishness interesting. I did indeed get some Hallmark notes in such pieces as The Four Sessions, in one version a painted over compilation of Kinkade winter scenes (complete with inquisitive deer peering at a bright cottage in the snow). Finally though, I opted for a combining and abstracting approach enlivened by details --sometimes actual quotes-- from Kinkade's rich arsenal of corny effects. In this way I was able to merge Kinkade motifs with my own organizing principles. I would take a typical glowing cottage and re-paint it, altering shapes, color and composition or juxtapose it with such unrelated things as a Cezanne group of trees or a Winslow Homer rooster in a courtyard. I would pull out a single Kinkadian element --a bridge, a stone walkway, some fluff of spring foliage-- and place it in a new context, painterly or digital. I also felt free to add outside stylistic interpretations --like the splotchy pointillistic frame of Night Bridge With Orange Surround (above) oil on canvas, 2013. In the more literal pieces, I printed out a slew of Kinkade landscapes and then made a composition out of them by cutting, joining and pasting the divergent scenes. A ten-foot-high version of The Four Seasons --a kind f a totem picture puzzle-- was made this way with nary a brushstroke added.
Kinkade called himself, in a trademarked phrase no less, "The Painter of Light" (or "lite," as would be more appropriate). Monet might have had a few choice words to say about this designation, but poor Kinkade evidently was unaware the exclusiveness that the definite article "the" proclaimed. Or then again, maybe he was totally aware that by calling himself THE Painter of Light instead of just A Painter of Light that it would help propel him into phenomenal commercial success. The phrase, for whatever reason, made me think of Seurat, and then Roy Lichtenstein. I had done riffs on Lichtenstein's ben-day dot paintings previously, and I sought a way to use them as patterns that would simultaneously over-ride and enliven Kinkade's bland surfaces. In a few pieces the Kinkade cottage was invaded by just such a pattern of painterly dots (nothing like the neat, mechanical dots of Lichtenstein). In Christmas Vignette I and 2, (oil on canvas, 2013) the mesh of dots becomes a surrogate atmosphere pulsating around a very loosely brushed cottage.
Other times I looked for some way to find formal clarity in Kinkade's murkily constructed world. Flood With Big Floating Roof, for example, displays a sharp realism that, with its odd spatial arrangement, is tinged with a surrealistic feel. The idea to plant some natural disaster, like this flood, within these unflaggingly bucolic scenes was a constant temptation. I fully gave in with the "lightning strike" pictures (Attractive Cottage and Lightning Strike With Rooster are examples) and the deluges that threaten to swamp those picturesque bridges. Maybe I show a bit too much glee in my enthusiastic dive into bathos in these works, It was always my plan to derail Kinkade's happy, languid aesthetic, but I never intended to be mean- spirited about it. I hope I haven't been: Kinkade is just too easy a target. And then his unexpected death at 54 in 2013 made me even more aware that plain, unadulterated mockery would, at this point, produce nothing more than a wan, rasping voice. I prefer to let my cynicism about such work as Kinkade's keep a low, under-the-radar presence.
Flood With Floating Roof, acrylic on canvas, 2013.
Garden of Heavenly Rays, acrylic on canvas, 2013
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Death Mask Ikon, archival pigment print, 2013
This is borrowed from a Kinkade painting of Christ that I superimposed with a rough likeness of The Painter of Light himself. I added the glowing orbs to indicate the artist's depiction of everything in religious terms, an attitude that I imagine carried over to his person. The title here is an anagram of the artist's name. |
The Four Seasons, acrylic over pigment print, 2013.
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Left: Bridge With Glowing Light on Salmon-colored Background, oil on canvas, 2012. This ubiquitous Kinkade stone bridge appears in a number of pieces, including, right, Night Bridge In Deep Blue, archival pigment print, 2013. |
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Walkway To Heaven, oil on pigment print, 2012.
A stone's throw from paradise, maybe? |
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Above: Failed Rainbow, archival pigment print collage, 2013.
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Above, left to right: I Saw the Letter K In Gold,acrylic on canvas, 2013; Christmas Vignette 1, oil over pigment print with collage on canvas, 2012; Bend But Don't Break, oil over pigment print on canvas, 2012.
I Saw the Letter K In Gold is a reference to the painting by Charles Demuth called I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, itself inspired by a poem by William Carlos Williams. Later, Robert Indiana was to do a marvelous pop update. Right: The Eternal Beacon, acrylic on three canvases, 2014 |
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Left: Cottage Industry (Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue), oil and acrylic on five assembled canvas, 2012-13.
This painting is a good example of how distortion, heightened color and the wiping away of all volume-producing dark shadows can transform the typical (aren't they all "typical"?) Kinkade cottage into something approaching an abstract painting. The subtitle is from a great (and immense) painting by Barnett Newman. The painting was Newman's brilliant challenge to the the proscription of the time (the 1960s) that Mondrian's primary color scheme would get one nowhere.
Left: Doubled Bridge With Sunrise, oil over pigment print collaged on canvas, 2012.
The theme of the arched brick bridge provided me the clearest path to a
minimalist presentation in which the subject matter is subsumed
to the abstract conditions of the painting.
In a number of pieces I attempted to employ the Kinkade image more or less intact. In Morning Mist, Night Moon (left), I did some minimal adjustment to the value scheme and some Photoshop blurring and added a cutout overlay from another source image --this one from a wall paper mural in a local private club. The soft pink rectangle that backs the whole ensemble I hope sets the nostalgic mood, echoing but not imitating Kinkade's saccharine sweetness.
Left: Morning Haze, Night Moon, collage, acrylic, archival pigment print, 2012.