I first started thinking about the larger issues around Kinkade's work and its popularity when I heard a wonderful report by Louise Rafkin on NPR in 2001 about a housing development in Vallejo CA that was built to look like a Kinkade painting. People were immediately taken in by the cuteness and hominess, and Kinkade tells her that he wanted to create a place where you would want to make memories. He continues, saying he'd like to create something like Walt Disney did with "the happiest place on earth" only that people could live there (he quotes Disney a lot, which comes into this story later). But Rafkin finds this quaintness "fake and forced" and discusses her own childhood in the 1960's in a brand new beach community, a scene of Kinkade's often referenced "simpler times", and while of course there were good memories made there, there were also memories of divorce and addiction. She notes that Kinkade's paintings rarely feature people and posits that if human beings, with all of their failings and shortcomings, were there, it would muddy up the idyllic picture. What would this collection of perfect homes in a perfect neighborhood be like in a year or two after they had been the settings for the disappointments, and fights, and betrayals that accompany us wherever we live.
Gregory Wolfe discusses this somewhat in his Wall Street Journal article, "Art in a Fallen World," that was published just after Kinkade's death, particularly dealing with Kinkade's desire to paint a world without a fallen humanity. And it's not that art shouldn't portray and inspire ideals--Wolfe cites the ancient Greeks here--but, "that our nostalgia is for an ideal we can only find after accepting, and passing through, the brokenness of a fallen world. Any other approach, in art or in life, is a form of denial."
There is a similar difficulty in another mainstream art-form: comics. I'm thinking particularly of Superman and why, as much as we love him (he was basically what started our American love affair with superheroes) we really aren't buying it. He's an invincible boy scout. He's a handsome and capable Dudley Do-right. And even when they try to make him grittier, we don't buy that either. I think it has to do with Wolfe's notion of an ideal without a fall. That's why we love Batman. He exists and operates in the unbelievably fallen world of Gotham, and Bruce Wayne is not above it, but continually has to confront it in himself. (To DC's credit, in the last few issues of Batman Beyond Unlimited, which is set a few generations in the future, we find an aging and alone Superman, who has outlived his loved ones--Louis Lane, et al--living in a world where technology has given police similar powers to his, and now he questions his existence and importance in all of it. It will also be interesting to see how next year's Christopher Nolan produced "Man of Steel" turns out.)
The other issue with Kinkade is Kinkade. Susan Orlean wrote a wonderful piece on him for the New Yorker in 2001; she quotes him saying, "I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people.... My art is relevant because it's relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I'm relevant to real people." He sat up and started to laugh. "I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was 'The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.' And you know, that's the dead art we don't want anything to do with!" He laughed again and slapped his thighs. "We're the art of life, man! We're bringing the life back to art!....I'm thinking of starting this program of loaning a few of my paintings to some of these [art establishment] critics and let them live with them for a year or two and see what they think then. Because art really grows as you live with it. See, I have faith in the heart of the average person. People find hope and comfort in my paintings. I think showing people the ugliness of the world doesn't help it. I think pointing the way to light is deeply contagious and satisfying. I would want to argue that I'm not an antagonist to modernists. I just believe in picture-making for people. I'm a firebrand. I will sit down and debate the grand tradition with anyone. I am really the most controversial artist in the world."
Pretentious doesn't even come close. The only word that seems fitting is asshole. This was in 2001, when he was still on top of his world without the fall, but even when we try to create a perfect world, the cracks start to show in the paint. Kinkade's fall came just a few years later.
The LA Times ran "Dark Portrait of a 'Painter of Light'" in 2006, in which Kinkade says that his paintings bring "God's light" into people's lives and that "God guides his paintbrush and his life", but we see the reality: business fraud and lawsuits, as well as personal behavior which includes public drunkenness (he heckled Sigfried and Roy at one of their Vegas shows by yelling "Codpiece!" over and over, and he cursed a former employee's wife for trying to help him when he fell off of a barstool), groping a woman's breasts at a signing party, and several instances of public urination, including pissing on a statue of Winnie the Pooh outside the Disneyland Hotel and yelling, "There's one for you, Walt!" Kinkade himself called this, "Ritual territory marking."
When he died in April, Kinkade's humanity was laid bare. He and his wife of 28 years, Nanette--the woman who Kinkade had honored by hiding her initials and the date of their anniversary in his paintings (which was also a selling point for buyers seeking family values romanticism)--filed for legal separation in 2010. According to the LA Times, "Less than two months later, one of the artist's many companies sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which resulted in the establishment of a payment plan to cover a legal settlement. Kinkade had lost a suit against former gallery owners, who said he had used his Christian faith to induce them to invest and then stuck them with unsellable goods. With interest and legal fees, he owed $2.8 million. Two weeks after the filing, Kinkade was arrested for driving under the influence."
That year he also met Amy Pinto and by early 2011, she and her daughter had moved into Kinkade's home. At his death, it was Pinto who told reporters that he had died of natural causes at his home with the woman he loved (it turns out he died of an overdose of alcohol and Valium). Now, Nanette and Amy Pinto are duking it out over the 60 million dollar estate left behind.
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This past week, PBS Digital Studios continued it's remixed series (even for those of us who hate auto-tune, the Mr. Rogers "Garden of Your Mind" was wonderful) with a Bob Ross remix "Happy Little Clouds". I loved Bob Ross when I was a kid. Loved watching how a landscape appeared almost magically from normal looking paintbrushes in a half-hour, and loved his quiet reassuring voice that told us, "There are no mistakes here, just happy accidents." As I got older, I knew that what he was doing wasn't critically acclaimed art, but I didn't care. It wasn't the art. It was the joy that he expressed and shared while he was painting. The art wasn't what was on the canvas but watching him at the canvas.
While writing about Kinkade, I wondered how Ross had been written about in the press, and found this 2001 article in the NY Times: "The Undying Magic of Bob Ross's Happy Little Trees". Even after his 1995 death to cancer, his shows remain popular worldwide, often played without being overdubbed in the language of the viewer ("His voice, and his homey aphorisms, are beyond translation.") Bob Ross never made claims that his art was worthy of critical recognition, but even some artists find something special about him. "David Lloyd Glover, a professional artist from Beverly Hills, Calif., was flipping channels three years ago when he came upon Ross and has been a fan ever since. "It reminds me of painting as a child," he said. "As you get older, the teachers say, `You have to paint like this,' between the lines or whatever, and once the rules are put in place it delineates who's the artist and who isn't. What Bob Ross does is bring us back in touch with our innate childhood creativity. He takes away the rules. He keeps saying, `Well, I could put a bush here, or a tree here, or a stream here — I don't know, it's your world.' "
There's also something about the fact that Ross did all of his PBS shows for free, making his money instead from his paint supplies and instructional videos and books. All the paintings that he painted on the shows were donated to PBS stations across the country.
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I think what all of us are looking for in art is authenticity. That genuine passion that comes from our expression of the human condition in the world around us. There is a separation between art and craft. Someone can be a skilled painter or writer or musician, but passionless in their expression. Likewise, someone can lack technical perfection, but something about their unique vision of the world grabs hold of us. In some you get it all, mastery and authentic expression. In others, the lack of skill is so distracting one can only look away.
Likewise, there is the artist's relationship with their work. Compare Kinkade and Ross. Their paintings in many ways are similar, but their relationship with their work, and with the viewers of their work, is markedly different. Eudora Welty said that a novel is a shared experience between writer and reader. I'd say this extends to all forms of expression.
To create is to lay oneself bare. It's to reveal one's view of the world shaped by one's experiences. Even if it's done in subtleties or through fictions, even if the scene the artist is painting or writing or creating through sound has nothing to do with the specific details of that artist's life, honesty is required. Anything else is a trick of the light.
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