[artists] Thomas Kinkade Is Teh Suck

Doin' a little catch-up here. The comments I got on this post were quite good and got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing amongst amateurs.

Anyway! In the aforementioned post, we discovered that the vaunted "Painter of Light", Thomas Kinkade, has rather decided feet of clay (story from the LA Times, via Arts & Letters Daily). pril and Carla commented.

Per pril:

JMO here, but his stuff makes me ill

I just hate when you equivocate. Tell us what you really feel, won't you? After describing her revenge (go to the comments, it looks much better in context), she continues:

I don't mind that other people are fanatical about it, or even like it just a little bit, but I'll take the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood over Kinkade's stuff anytime, at least as far as luminosity and detail goes.

Or maybe even Maxwell Parrish, who, while not counted as a pre-Raphaelite, was contemporary to some of the later ones and certainly had his own way with light. Come to think of it, in terms of luminosity and style, Kinkade is probably what Parrish whould be like when you subtract passion. Public piety (he tends to make a meal of how Christian he is) and sentimentality are all well and good but art without passion creates paintings that are just like Kinkades–technically adept but hardly moving.

Carla had this to say:

Yup--gotta go with pril on this one. I find Kinkade's work contrived and uninspiring, personally. I would definitely take a Pre-Raphaelite work (or a 18th century Impressionist, for that matter) over Kinkade easily.

Like I said–unmoving. Cute, kitschy, but 100 years from now people will still be talking about certain artists, and I'm pretty sure that Kinkade won't be one of them. Maybe they'll refer to him dismissively, sort of an American Biedermeyer maybe. But that's about it.

Carla's last sentence gets the last word, because someone had to say it:

Sounds like the guy spends a little too much time insulated from reality.

Couldn't agree more.