I’m listening to WWDTM just now on WBEZ and they had Scott Simon on playing their “Not My Job” game. His subject: “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade (REGISTERED TRADEMARK). As soon as Peter said “Kinkade,” “LA Times,” and hints of the chiaroscurity of Kinkade’s doings in private life, I had to Google it. Because, of course, I can’t stand Kinkade or his crappy drek, which is all over Lahaina in multiple galleries on both sides of the street.

Dark Portrait of a ‘Painter of Light’ – Los Angeles Times

Amongst his more colorful (and beautifully depicted) acts: he got loudly and boorishly drunk at a Siegfried and Roy show in Vegas, became obsessed with their “packages,” and began yelling loudly, “Codpiece! Codpiece!” and also urinated on a statue of Winnie the Pooh outside the Disneyland Hotel, remarking “This one’s for you, Walt.” He explained the latter incident away as the “ritual territory marking” of a country boy.

(I’m still listening to the show: “The Shiites got their peanut butter in the Sunni chocolate!” just threw me into a coughing/laughing jag. I sound frighteningly like Bette Davis)

I’ve ranted about Kinkade’s drek before, so this LA Times story is particularly tasty. He’s got some dealer problems, legal problems based on his rather sharp and agressive business practices, and seems to be blaming the decline in the total number of a certain kind of franchised gallery on “a result of a broad decline in the limited-edition art business, hastened by the dot-com crash, a shrinking economy and the Sept. 11 attacks.”

No, really. Rather than the more likely explaination; his work is worthless crap and people who may once have liked his charming country cottages lost interest when he became a “cottage” industry. His fans tend to be drawn from the faith-based community rather than the reality-based one, too.

He’s well-known as a God fearing, saved, born-again Christian, and he truly has given a lot of money to good causes, like the Make-A-Wish foundation. But he’s not as squeaky clean and endearing in real life as he might depict himself in one of his own paintings. And a number of former dealers of his Paintings of Shite (REGISTERED TRADEMARK – it’s all mine now) have cause to regret ever investing in his “vision.”

When we bought this house, there were several elaborately framed Kinkade prints in every room, with Bible verses added into custom-cut mats. The former owners had something to do with a well-known local megachurch, and Kinkade’s stuff was very much to their taste. But I’d been sensitized to his “art” already by the aforementioned visits to Lahaina, which is pretty much a gallery town when you take away the restaurants, T-shirt shops, and activitie broker booths. And like I said, there seems to be a Kinkade gallery on every other block, but apparently there’s only one. Maybe there’s more than one branch of the same owner’s franchises? I don’t know.

Here’s a re-vision of Kinkade’s work, updated to add even more realistic highlights. This is from an old Boing Boing post, which announced a mashup of “Painters of Blight” at a Seattle art gallery a couple of years ago. I like this one; it speaks to me.