Thomas Kinkade Exposed

The LA TIMES tore painter Thomas Kinkade a new one with yesterday’s article about his crude behavior and shady business practices. As far as I’m concerned, Kinkade is to fine art what Shag is to “pop surrealism”: a mediocre and formulaic artist who has tapped into a very specific market and snookered that fanbase into believing that his work has some kind of merit. The piece mentions that Kinkade had worked in animation prior to becoming a ‘fine artist’, which is something I wasn’t aware of. A quick search online reveals that he was a background painter on Ralph Bakshi’s FIRE AND ICE (1983). The TIMES piece also has this anecdote about Kinkade’s “territory marking” habits:

And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

“This one’s for you, Walt,” the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.

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