Thomas Kinkade

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William Thomas Kinkade III (January 19, 1958 – April 6, 2012) was an American painter of popular realistic, pastoral, and idyllic subjects.

He is notable for his success, during his lifetime, with the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products via the Thomas Kinkade Company.

According to Kinkade's company, one in every twenty American homes owns a copy of one of his paintings.He described himself as a "Painter of Light", a phrase he protected through trademark, but which was originally used hundreds of years ago to describe the English artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851).

Early life and education

William Thomas Kinkade was born on January 19, 1958, in Sacramento County, California. He grew up in the town of Placerville, graduated from El Dorado High School in 1976, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Some of the people who mentored and taught Kinkade prior to college were Charles Bell and Glenn Wessels. Wessels encouraged Kinkade to go to the University of California at Berkeley. Kinkade's relationship with Wessels is the subject of a semi-autobiographical movie released during 2008, Christmas Cottage. After two years of general education at Berkeley, Kinkade transferred to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Personal life

Kinkade married Nanette Willey in 1982, and the couple had four daughters: Merritt (b. 1988), Chandler (b. 1991), Winsor (b. 1995) and Everett (b. 1997), all named for famous artists. He and his wife had been separated for more than a year before his death in 2012.

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Career

Kinkade spent a summer in the United States with his college buddy James Gurney. The two of them completed their journey in New York and Guptill Publications was hired to produce a sketching handbook. Two years ago, they published The Artist's Guide to Sketching, which was one of Guptill Publications' best-sellers of the year.

Because of the book's success, we ended up both working for Ralph Bakshi Studios, where they created background art for the 1983 animated film Fire and Ice. Kinkade began to investigate the portrayal of light and of imagined worlds while filming.

Kinkade began as a painter, selling his originals in galleries around California after the film.

The vibrant hues and pastel shades of Kinkade's paintings are recurring features of the artist's works. His paintings often depict bucolic and idyllic settings such as gardens, streams, stone cottages, lighthouses, and Main Streets, which have been revived with idealistic values of American scene painting. For several of his street and snow scenes, his hometown of Placerville (where his works are prominent) was the inspiration. He also illustrated various Christian topics, including the Christian cross and churches.

Kinkade continued to emphasize the value of simple pleasures and that his intention was to give inspirational quotes through his paintings. Kinkade, who also gave all four of his children the middle name "Christian"), said he was inspired by his religious convictions and that his work was supposed to have a moral arc. Several images display precise allusions to Bible passages from chapter-to-verse.

"I am often asked why there are no people in my paintings," Kinkade said, but he did a portrait of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2009 that included photographs of the crowd, omitting Norman Rockwell and Dale Earnhardt's figures among them. He also created the farewell portrait for Yankee Stadium. Kinkade wrote an article about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway painting:

Jeffrey Vallance, an artist and Guggenheim Fellow, has discussed Kinkade's devout religious inspirations and their reception in the art world:

Joan Didion, an essayist, is a Kinkade protester: her style is criticized by essayist Joan Didion:

In his Donner Lake from the Summit, Didion also likened the "Kinkade Glow" to Albert Bierstadt's luminous Donner Pass. Didion saw "unsettling similarities" between the two artists and concerned that Kinkade's treatment of the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains Declare His Glory, in a way that "an acknowledgment of man's place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."

The Thomas Kinkade Heaven on Earth exhibition was directed by Mike McGee of the CSUF Grand Central Art Center at Fullerton, California State University.

Kinkade's production process has been described as "a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefabricated base provided by Kinkade." According to reports, Kinkade conceived and printed all of his designs, which were then transferred to the next stage of mass-producing prints. It is said that he conceived the majority of the original, conceptual works that he produced. However, he also hired a few studio assistants to help produce multiple prints of his popular oils. So, though Kinkade is believed to have designed and painted all of his original paintings, collectors were likely to buy ones that were not Kinkade, and they were likely to have manual brush strokes by someone other than Kinkade.

Kinkade is said to be one of the most counterfeited artists, owing in large part to advancements in affordable, high-resolution digital photography, and printing technologies. In addition, mass-produced hand-painted fakes from countries such as China and Thailand abound in the United States and around the world. In 2011, the Kinkade studio said that Kinkade was Asia's most collected artist, but that no money was received from those regions due to widespread forgery.

Kinkade's products are available via mail order or in designated retail stores. Some of the prints also have light effects that are applied to the print surface by "skilled craftsmen," adding to the illusion of light and the resemblance to an original work of art and then selling at higher rates. Kinkade's images have been used extensively for other products such as calendars, jigsaw puzzles, greeting cards, and CDs, thanks to the licensing agreement with Hallmark and other companies. His photographs were also on Walmart gift cards by December 2009.

Kinkade's artistic output was estimated to have earned $53 million from 1997 to 2005. Several hundred Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries existed back in 2000, but they began to decline during the late-2000s recession. During June 2010, Morgan Hill, California manufacturing operation that reconstructed the art submitted a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, earning almost $6.2 million in creditors' claims. Pacific Metro planned to reduce its overheads by outsourcing a substantial amount of its manufacturing.

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