Thomas Kinkade has no soul. If he did, he wouldn't paint such souless works of schlock. Whenever I used to see "art" like that - those insipid, lifeless landscapes - I figured that a machine, or a very sad, repressed artist, was forced to paint that crappy kitsch artwork for sale in the K-Mart.
Turns out I was wrong. Kinkade is the Beanie Baby of the art world. Those things have blank, vague eyes that stare at you, yet they became insanely popular. Just like a typical Kinkade landscape.
Every time I walk past his store in the mall, I want to go in with a can of spray paint and go to town, to turn his "not-art" into "art" - for once add some passion to those bland images, even if it's only punk passion. It irritates me that people keep giving this guy, this talentless hack, money for his banal, mindless, trivial paintings.
And get this: they aren't even real paintings! I researched this rant carefully! And I discovered that he employs people called "highlighters" to "enhance images"! From the Master Hack Sham Artist's website, I quote: "Master Highlighters are hand-picked and have worked on Studio Proofs. They also have graduated from Thomas Kinkade 101, a class teaching the proper Master Highlighting Techniques as well as personal instructions by Thomas Kinkade." Just how freakin' difficult can it be to put a couple of specks of white paint onto a lithograph??? Any grandmother who's watched Bob Ross wield his 'mighty fan brush' on PBS could do that! Gawd, if I had to make my living slaving under the non-artistic lash of The Painter of Schlock, putting little dots of paint on fake canvas after fake canvas of kitsch, I couldn't look at myself in the mirror.
In fact, I think that Kinkade stole all of Bob Ross' formulaic moves! I think that if you were to visit the studio of the Painter of Schlock, you'd find Bob Ross books and videos there among the tubes of pink and purple paint. While Bob Ross' art sucked ass too, at least Bob Ross had a wacky white man's afro that implied a hint of personality! (And I seem to remember he made a promo spot for MTV, back when they actually played videos. But I digress.) Kinkade looks like the evil love child of Stacy Keach and Tom Selleck. He slaps the label of "Christian" on his artwork to try to gain moral high ground, just like a politician.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like post-modern crap that doesn't look like anything. My idea of good paintings includes Renaissance art, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Salvador Dali, who acknowledged the Great Masters of the past. My main objection to the Painter of Schlock is the tepid, weak, spineless scenes of nothing. No soul = no art. The popularity of this hack just proves that marketing makes the world go 'round. Which is why I'm getting out of marketing, this frankly makes my stomach churn.
To commemorate a memorable line I spouted off in a recent anti-Kinkade rant (I rant every time I see that awful non-art), Godfrey created this illustration:
