Monthly Archives: June 2012

Kinkade 1998 vs. 2004

Rachel Held Evans’s Sunday Superlatives are usually a good roundup of Jesusy People bloggery, and nestled among the links I found what is one of the best articulations of why Thomas Kinkade’s work has always bugged me so damn much–not just on an aesthetic level but on a much deeper emotional level. I’ve always felt that his stuff wasn’t just drippily schmaltzy but was also wrong somehow, and I really think this is why:

The problem with light is that we assume it always reveals, but light without its requisite shadow, which is a light of our own making, conceals…The soft, fuzzy glow of sentimentality that distracts from the shadows we’ve edited out, exaggerating what never truly was, is a deceiving angel.

Thomas McDonald wrote the most interesting blog post I found regarding Kinkade’s death (it’s hard-edged but not unfairly so—read it here), and he quoted Simcha Fisher who described Kinkade’s art as “anti-Incarnational,” saying, “Kinkade-style light doesn’t show an affection for natural beauty—it shows his disdain for it. His light doesn’t reveal, it distorts. His paintings aren’t merely trivial, they’re a statement of contempt for the world.” Even if her words are accurate (and I think she’s onto something), I remain sympathetic. We all desire escape from that which most wounds us. Maybe if he had learned to better hold the tensions, to embrace both the unflinching nature of light and the unsettling shadows it sometimes casts, perhaps there could have been a different outcome for Kinkade and his art.

If Kinkade had really been a “Painter of Light”, his work would have been not only beautiful but deeply unsettling. Should have been. Light isn’t inherently a warm, fuzzy thing, and I think we all have times when we’d rather avoid it–when light doesn’t mean safety but exposure of inner darkness.

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