Thomas Kinkade

Kinkade described himself as a "Painter of Light", a Phrase he protected by trademark, but which was earlier used to describe the English artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851).

Kinkade was criticized for some of his behavior and business practices; art critics faulted his work for being "kitsch".

Kinkade died of "acute intoxication" from alcohol and the drug diazepam at the age of 54.

William Thomas Kinkade III (January 19, 1958 – April 6, 2012) was an American painter of popular realistic, pastoral, and idyllic subjects.

He is notable for achieving success during his lifetime with the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products by means of the Thomas Kinkade Company.

According to Kinkade's company, one in every 20 American homes owned a copy of one of his paintings.

William Thomas Kinkade was born on January 19, 1958, in Sacramento County, California.

He grew up in the town of Placerville, graduated from El Dorado High School in 1976, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Some of the people who mentored and taught Kinkade prior to college were Charles Bell and Glenn Wessels.

Wessels encouraged Kinkade to go to the University of California at Berkeley.

During June 1980, Kinkade spent a summer traveling across the United States with his college friend James Gurney.

The two of them finished their journey in New York and secured a contract with Guptill Publications to produce a sketching handbook.

Two years later they produced a book, The Artist's Guide to Sketching, which was one of Guptill Publications' best-sellers that year.

The success of the book resulted in both working for Ralph Bakshi Studios where they created background art for the 1983 animated feature movie Fire and Ice.

While working on the movie, Kinkade began to explore the depiction of light and of imagined worlds.

After the movie, Kinkade worked as a painter, selling his originals in galleries throughout California.

Recurring features of Kinkade's paintings are their pastel colors and brilliant illumination of the scene.

Rendered with idealistic values of American scene painting, his works often portray bucolic and idyllic settings, such as gardens, streams, stone cottages, lighthouses and Main Streets.

His hometown of Placerville (where his works are much displayed) was the inspiration for many of his street and snow scenes.

He also depicted various Christian themes, including the Christian cross and churches.

His country scenes rarely depict people, a point that he frequently received questions about.

Kinkade said he was emphasizing the value of simple pleasures and that his intent was to communicate inspirational messages through his paintings.

A self-described "devout Christian" (even giving all four of his children the middle name "Christian" ), Kinkade believed he gained his inspiration from his religious beliefs and that his work was intended to include a moral dimension.

Many pictures include specific chapter-and-verse allusions to Bible passages.

Kinkade's relationship with Wessels is the subject of a semi-autobiographical movie released during 2008, Christmas Cottage. After two years of general education at Berkeley, Kinkade transferred to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

In 2009, he painted a portrait of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the cover of that year's Indianapolis 500 race program that included details of the crowd, hiding among them the figures of Norman Rockwell and Dale Earnhardt.

He also painted the farewell portrait for Yankee Stadium.

Concerning the Indianapolis Motor Speedway painting, Kinkade said: "The passion I have is to capture memories, to evoke the emotional connection we have to an experience. I came out here and stood up on the bleachers and looked around, and I saw all the elements of the track. It was empty at the time. But I saw the stadium, how the track laid out, the horizon, the skyline of Indianapolis and the Pagoda. I saw it all in my imagination. I began thinking, 'I want to get this energy — what I call the excitement of the moment — into this painting.' As I began working on it, I thought, 'Well you have this big piece of asphalt, the huge spectator stands; I've got to do something to get some movement.' So I just started throwing flags into it. It gives it kind of a patriotic excitement."

Artist and Guggenheim Fellow Jeffrey Vallance has spoken about Kinkade's devout religious themes and their reception in the art world:

"This is another area that the contemporary art world has a hard time with, that I find interesting. He expresses what he believes and puts that in his art. That is not the trend in the high-art world at the moment, the idea that you can express things spiritually and be taken seriously ... It is always difficult to present serious religious ideas in an art context. That is why I like Kinkade. It is a difficult thing to do."

Essayist Joan Didion is a representative critic of Kinkade's style:

"A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."

Didion compared the "Kinkade Glow" to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit. She saw "unsettling similarities" between the two painters and worried that Kinkade's treatment of the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignored the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite's Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls "an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."

Mike McGee, director of the CSUF Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton, wrote of the Thomas Kinkade Heaven on Earth exhibition:

"Looking just at the paintings themselves it is obvious that they are technically competent. Kinkade's genius, however, is in his capacity to identify and fulfill the needs and desires of his target audience—he cites his mother as a key influence and archetypal audience — and to couple this with savvy marketing ... If Kinkade's art is principally about ideas, and I think it is, it could be suggested that he is a Conceptual artist. All he would have to do to solidify this position would be to make an announcement that the beliefs he has expounded are just Duchampian posturing to achieve his successes. But this will never happen. Kinkade earnestly believes in his faith in God and his personal agenda as an artist."

Kinkade's production method has been described as "a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade."

Kinkade reportedly designed and painted all of his works, which were then moved into the next stage of the process of mass-producing prints.

It is assumed he created most of the original, conceptual work that he produced.

However, he also employed a number of studio assistants to help create multiple prints of his famous oils.

Thus while it is believed that Kinkade designed and painted all of his original paintings, the ones collectors were likely to own were printed factory-like and touched up with manual brush strokes by someone other than Kinkade.