Revue “ Art for Everybody '': Exhibit 'Painter of Light' Kinkade's Dark Side

If you think you've never seen Thomas Kinkade painting, think again. The deceased artist, who would have sold more canvases than any painter in history, has created an omnipresent and mass cottage industry (word of words) and mass produces with his blissful landscapes, idyllic street scenes and comfortable cottage paintings. But the beatific charismatic painter, who developed a rock star, was not all it seemed.

Miranda Yousef, in his beginnings in direction, skillfully faces Kinkade's right and intriguing history in the documentary “Art for Everybody”, an absorbing and intelligently assembled portrait of the mounted mega and the tragic fall in the fall of Jekyll-And-Hyde type artist.

The huge success of Kinkade of the 1990s, which saw his work reproduced on everything, from collector plates to the construction sites of La-Z-Boy, concorded with the cultural war of the period against the sexualization of art. The Kinkade born new has entered this breach, doubled family values ​​and has become known as a creator of images that the Christian community, among other groups, could kiss. But how much of that was opportunism and what was the real belief?

Yousef, who also published the film, strongly dissects the complicated life of the artist with the help of archive sequences and solid sequences as well as frank interviews with family members, colleagues and a solid range of figures in the art world.

She first followed Kinkade of her depleted youth Placeville, California, in the late 1970s as a student in Bohème art at the UC Berkeley Ralph Bakshi“The animated fantasy of 1983” Fire and Ice “. (Bakshi, now 86, enthuses here about Kinkade's talent and work ethics.)

Kinkade's emerging pieces were often dark and provocative. But it is his transition to painting – in particular his Bucolic pastels signature with their almost clear windows and sky, which would lead him, him and the trading partner, Ken Raasch to create an Empire of art which, to its peak, would have reported more than $ 100 million in annual sales. Kinkade eponymous shopping stores and QVC appearances were among its many lucrative points of sale. He was nicknamed the “painter of light”, even if the British artist JMW Turner first said this title in the early 1800s.

But from a transparent artistic point of view, was Kinkade's work? Or was it just the Middlebrow kitsch?

The art critic of Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, who offers several without eyeshadows here, says that Kinkade “had a completely disproportionate cultural impact with very bad art”. From his famous chalet paintings, Knight calls them “a cliché stacked on a fantasy stacked on a bad idea. This chalet is where the wicked witch lives … I don't go. “

Journalist and author Susan Orlean (“The Orchid Thief”), which profiled Kinkade for a 2001 New York article which lends this documentary its title, considers its production “very sentimental, a little garish and in a way twee”, despite its attraction certainly.

However, Kinkade, often seen in the clips of the film as confident and bubbling with a kind of fervor from the evangelist, repels opponents by affirming: “All the great art is not a question of art – all the great art is a question of life.” And he brought this belief to the bank, literally.

But these are recent interviews with the wife of Kinkade, Nanette (they got married in 1982), and their four daughters of the millennium – Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett – who provide the emotional weight of the DOC and threw precious light on the tumultuous man behind the serene paintings.

Yousef masterfully transports us happier memories of Kinkade women as a family man devoted to someone whose work and fame began to replace the needs of his wife and children. His family says he could be “maniac” and “difficult to connect” and, from a few Kinkade clips behind the scenes during promotional events, he seemed to treat his daughters in alponte as accessories for cameras. In addition, the artist sometimes reveals himself as Smarmy and controversial, putting his character “saint” and his populist atmosphere.

From 2006 to 2010, a series of major commercial slowdowns, including a bankruptcy deposit and several key prosecution, led Kinkade to a descending spiral of public behavior and disturbing drug addiction. (Images showing that the compulsive need of Kinkade alcohol is disturbing.) His family, angry and frightening, even organized an intervention to force the old teetrotaler in detoxification cure. Although he reluctantly went, the therapy has not taken. He died in 2012, at the age of 54, an accidental overdose of alcohol and valium.

In the end, the centerpiece of the film is the posthumous discovery by the vault by the daughters of Kinkade which houses a tracing of the invisible and artistic work of their father, a large part of which shows a underside that few people knew – or could have imagined. The review of women of demons and defects of their complex father, vis-à-vis these discovered creations, is enlightening and poignant.

Among the other subjects of the Doc interview are the former investigation journalist Kim Christensen, who wrote several items About the legal problems of Kinkade, which included fraud of the art gallery; The girlfriend of Kinkade college, who remembers her sometimes hostile and dualist nature; and artist Jeffrey VallanceWho organized the only major Kinkade work survey exhibition, which was held in 2004 at the Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center.