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Another lovely day in the
land of Kinkade
Molly Colin |
| Painter
Thomas Kinkade isn't starving in a garret for his art.
The man who calls himself America's most collected artist
has sold his name to a community one urbanist calls 'marketing
crap' |
Monday, October
21, 2002
Special to The Globe and Mail
VALLEJO, CALIF. -- The table is set for six but no one is "home" in
the two-storey, Tudor-style house overlooking the man-made lake and
green fairways about a 40-minute drive east from San Francisco. A
Chopin nocturne wafts through the comfortably furnished rooms whose
walls are covered with the bucolic landscapes of Thomas Kinkade, who
calls himself America's most collected artist.
Outside, ducks glide under a quaint footbridge on the lake while cows graze on
the rolling hills beyond the white picket fences. Inside the house, an uncannily
similar peaceful landscape hangs in the dining
room.
But then this is a model home in the Village, a gated community of mixed architectural
styles inspired by Kinkade's vision of simpler
times.
It is a place where life is supposed to imitate art.
Except that it doesn't, really. That's not to say that the state's
first "themed" housing development doesn't offer small landscape
details that look plucked from the canvasses of the Painter of
Light, the artist's trademarked moniker: cobblestone driveways,
vintage-style lampposts and turreted stone entry gates.
"This is a dream come true," said Kinkade at the development's
opening, a few days before 9/11. "We have believed for many years that the
attachment people feel to the paintings could be embodied in a real place."
But fans of Thomas Kinkade, hoping to hang the artist's work in a
Cotswolds-style cottage set in a woodsy Kinkadean landscape with
cheery chimney smoke, will be profoundly disappointed. Even the
fireplaces are gas.
The homes -- each model named for one of the artist's four daughters
--
are different in colour and design, fringed by pretty landscaping of
heat-tolerant plants. Postcard-sized rear patios are their backyards. Architect
William Hezmalhalch designed the 1,538-to-2,637-square-foot houses for British-based
builder Taylor Woodrow in consultation with Kinkade. At least half of the planned
101 Kinkade homes have been built and the majority have been sold.
Resident Jane McWhorter bought her Stepping Stone Lane house just
after 9/11, when prices dropped. "I'm not a big Thomas Kinkade fan
at all," said the 48-year-old hairdresser. "But I love the area and
I like
his
homes."
Down the lane, prospective buyers surveyed the houses. "They don't
look modern, they look homey," said Amor Carrion, 60, a retired
federal employee.
Homey, however, hasn't been the buzzword in creating suburbs in the
55 years since Levittown, N.Y., America's first standardized community, was built.
In the past 20 years, a new urbanist movement has offered the concept of the
planned town designed to create community centres and reduce sprawl.
But the Vallejo, Calif., development, says one critic, misses that
goal badly. "The Village has no real village qualities -- mixed use,
interconnecting streets, different housing types," said urbanist
James Howard Kunstler, author of The City in Mind. "It's all
marketing crap."
Nonetheless, fans are drawn to the Village. "I like the peaceful
atmosphere," said Kinkade collector Gina Cain, 40, a financial
analyst.
And that, say observers, is partly what the Thomas Kinkade lifestyle
brand is about -- comfort and calm. It is what he is tapping into, they
say, with his paintings; a novel; inspirational videos; and licensed
products that include Nelson Bibles, puzzles, mugs and La-Z-Boy
armchairs.
Kinkade, however, believes God has given him the talent to transform
people's lives with his art, according to his Web site. (He declined
an interview through a spokeswoman, citing scheduling conflicts.)
The 44-year-old artist was raised by his mother in Placerville, a
small town in the Sierra foothills. He studied with California painter Glen Wessels
before attending the University of California, Berkeley, and the Art Center College
of Design in Pasadena. In his early 20s he worked as an illustrator in the film
industry, which he left to pursue painting. He sold his first pieces from his
car.
In 1982 he married his childhood sweetheart, Nanette, with whom he
Has four daughters. They live in the Santa Cruz mountains, about 90 minutes south
of San Francisco. As a Valentine to his wife, Kinkade
hides the letter N in every painting. In 1989, Kinkade co-founded Lightpost Publishing
to market his work.
But what galleries sell aren't original Thomas Kinkades. Those are
locked
away in a vault rumoured to be somewhere near the artist's home.
Instead the artworks available for sale are produced at a spacious
factory
in Morgan Hill, an hour's drive south of San Francisco. The company
says that Kinkade paints about a dozen new images a year. They are
digitally
reproduced, then transferred to a surface that is then attached to a
canvas. An assembly line of "highlight" artists, mostly Hispanic and
Asian
women paid by the hour, add extra colour.
At the high end of the various editions, $10,000 and up, "master
highlighters" -- personally supervised by Kinkade -- add dabs of
colour
to
the
image. At the low end, a framed, limited edition, paper print runs
about $600. All reproductions by Kinkade carry a numbered
certificate of authenticity and his auto-signature laden with his
DNA (hair samples).
"The DNA in his signature is a kind of insurance policy for the
piece," said
company spokeswoman Taya Lucero, as she led a guest on a tour of the
Morgan Hill factory. The company is careful to protect against
fraud
and theft; a palm scan is required for identification to enter a
vault where certificates are kept.
Fans are attracted to Kinkade's work for a variety of reasons. "For
some collectors, his paintings are a 30-second vacation," said Bob
Martin, the company's vice-president of marketing.
The paintings may offer a holiday in a blink but that doesn't make
them
art,
said San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker: "He's not
taken seriously by any critic except as a bizarre cultural
phenomenon."
Yet he is a phenomenon brilliantly conceived and sold, say admirers
of
his
marketing acumen. "Personally, I think he's a very creative person,
but the high-art crowd would never say anything nice about him,"said
UCLA
sociologist David Halle, author of Inside Culture,a study of art and
class in the American home.
Above the 49th parallel, Kinkade is hardly a household name. But
Toronto
art
dealer Vivian Kanargelidis hopes that will change. In May, 2001, she
and her husband, Ed Medeiros, opened the Thomas Kinkade Signature
Gallery in Yorkville, the only Canadian venue devoted solely to the
artist, she says.
The couple chose the Yorkville locale because of its largely
American tourist base that has been half of gallery sales until the
recent
decline
in
tourism, she said. Canadians make up the other half of sales, a
percentage
she's working to increase.
"I think more and more Canadians will start learning about Kinkade
and
start
buying him," she said. "His images appeal to a mass market, they're
affordable and they go up in value."
The road to becoming the artist's dealer began with a search for an
image
of
a path, said Kanargelidis, 40. She and her husband, who were both
accountants at the time, had invited a feng shui master into their
home
in
the Toronto suburb of Agincourt. "She said we needed a painting in
our house that had a road because a pathway represents progress in a
career," she said. The couple bought a Kinkade painting with such a
path and were immediately attracted to the artist's work. "It's how
it
makes
you feel when you look at it; it's the Ns that he hides; the light;
it's
a
conversation piece," Kanargelidis said.
Given his marketing savvy, it's not surprising Kinkade counts among
his influences Andy Warhol, a painter as famous for his image as for
his art process and brand. But there ends any similarity between the
two,
argues
Baker, the San Francisco Chronicle art critic.
"Warhol thought about the concepts he was making," he said. "What
Kinkade
is
doing is marketing these devices that are meant to facilitate
wishful thinking on the part of the collector. He's not the
Michelangelo
of
the malls, he's the Martha Stewart of the art world."
And like Martha Stewart, a dark cloud has descended on the Painter
of
Light.
Some of the company's 350 franchised galleries have closed. The
stock price for the company (traded on the NYSE) has fallen, and it
posted
losses last year of $16.6-million; the previous year it posted a
profit of $16.2-million.
The company is also the target of 10 lawsuits filed by disgruntled
gallery
owners who charge it with fraudulent business practices, which it
denies. The first lawsuit went to trial in San Jose in August.
But a bust of sales in the nation's malls has become a boon for
habitués
of
the nation's thrift shops. On a recent afternoon at the Goodwill
store in Milpitas, not far from Morgan Hill, a fan bought a small,
limited-edition
Kinkade landscape for $4.49. "It's my lucky day," beamed the
painting's new owner. Kinkade, presumably, would agree. |
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