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In reply to the discussion: The pile-on on Thomas Kinkaide - it's not about the art - [View all]Generic Other
(28,979 posts)18. a few words from the art critics
Nearly 500 paintings emerge daily from this immaculate place
Today, workers squeegee, peel, glue, dry and highlight The Light of Freedom, which depicts the Stars and Stripes fluttering before a World Trade Center-less Manhattan skyline. The sea of prints boasts a dizzying sameness that would make a Xerox machine jealous.
Kinkades divine yet technical inspiration was the perfection of a process by which an original oil painting he creates a dozen new images a year is digitally photographed, transferred onto a plastic-like surface and glued onto canvas. Each print visits highlight artists, mostly Hispanic and Asian hourly workers. In a paint-by-number style, they add a dot of red to a tree here, a dash of white to an interior light there.
There are nine versions of each reproduced image, from Standard Numbered editions, for a few hundred dollars, to Studio Proofs that feature a textured canvas, more highlighting and Kinkades machine-etched signature compete with his DNA, courtesy of mixing the ink with the painters hair and blood.
Today, workers squeegee, peel, glue, dry and highlight The Light of Freedom, which depicts the Stars and Stripes fluttering before a World Trade Center-less Manhattan skyline. The sea of prints boasts a dizzying sameness that would make a Xerox machine jealous.
Kinkades divine yet technical inspiration was the perfection of a process by which an original oil painting he creates a dozen new images a year is digitally photographed, transferred onto a plastic-like surface and glued onto canvas. Each print visits highlight artists, mostly Hispanic and Asian hourly workers. In a paint-by-number style, they add a dot of red to a tree here, a dash of white to an interior light there.
There are nine versions of each reproduced image, from Standard Numbered editions, for a few hundred dollars, to Studio Proofs that feature a textured canvas, more highlighting and Kinkades machine-etched signature compete with his DNA, courtesy of mixing the ink with the painters hair and blood.
Marco R. della Cava
Thomas Kinkade: Profit of light
USA Today, March 11, 2002
Putting Thomas Kinkade in an art-historical context is like trying to put Jack Chick in the context of the illustrated comic strip, says Peter Frank, associate editor of The Magazine Los Angeles and senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum. In the age of Photoshop, anybody can do this kind of crap.
Paul Cullum
Thomas Kinkades 16 Guidelines
for Making Stuff Suck
Vanity Fair, November 14, 2008
Sentimentality, as literary critic Alan Jacobs says in a recent interview with Mars Hill Journal, encourages us to suspend judgment and reflection in order to indulge deliberately in emotion for its own sake. Reflection reinforces and strengthens true emotions while exposing those feelings that are shallow and disingenuous. Sentimentalists, however, try to avoid this experience of reality and try to keep people from asking questions by giving them pleasing emotions they have not earned. The shameless manipulation of our emotions, says Jacobs, is the ultimate act of cynicism.
Kinkades cottage fantasies offer this sort of emotional manipulation. The cottages are self-contained emotional safehouses in which the viewer can shut himself off from true emotions earned through a real encounter with reality, from the rough and sometimes harsh realities of creation, and most importantly from other people.
Kinkades cottage fantasies offer this sort of emotional manipulation. The cottages are self-contained emotional safehouses in which the viewer can shut himself off from true emotions earned through a real encounter with reality, from the rough and sometimes harsh realities of creation, and most importantly from other people.
Joe Carter
Thomas Kinkades Cottage Fantasy
First Things, June 16, 2010
more reviews:
http://home.conservativebabylon.com/2012/04/07/hack-artist-christian-hypocrite-thomas-kinkade-dies/
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I'm more into steampunk. Never really liked many paintings except for Monet regardless of the
Snake Alchemist
Apr 2012
#14
Well, you can compare Monet's treatment of the little footbridge in his Giverny garden painting
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#24
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be realizing from their treatment of footbridges. nt
Snake Alchemist
Apr 2012
#29
I don't think there is anything you are "supposed" to be realizing, except what
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#62
Of course. You are right about Christina. But I do think that Wyeth was aware of Eakins works.
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#52
I have never been intellectual enough to tell people what qualifies as art and what does not. nt
Snake Alchemist
Apr 2012
#73
Now art is a science? Reminds me of parents telling their kids "that's not real music" througout
Snake Alchemist
Apr 2012
#93
And besides, Picasso was, with his Analytic Cubism, carrying Cezanne's vision (see his Bibemus
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#60
Skill doesn't make something art. Viewers liking something doesn't make it art, either.
Demit
Apr 2012
#66
What makes it "art" is being collected by rich people. That's the sum & total of it.
HiPointDem
Apr 2012
#82
He stood there next to a stack of printed canvases, dabbed on a highlight, signed the canvas, and
Demit
Apr 2012
#77
Of course you were addressing me. You hit Reply to my post, and you were quoting my words.
Demit
Apr 2012
#107
Seems, he was somewhat of a vicious hypocrite with socoipathic tendencies....wow.
Ecumenist
Apr 2012
#3
YES! No time to go into details, but he was unethical and treated people badly.
TalkingDog
Apr 2012
#7
Thank you. That's exactly what I keep saying. Hell, I even "like" Bob Ross on my facebook page.
TalkingDog
Apr 2012
#6
People like warhol aren't hard to understand. They like cash, they like to be around people with
HiPointDem
Apr 2012
#101
Do you think we'll see Kinkade's stuff at MoMA, on the same floor with the Jasper Johns and
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#27
As I have said, this "high art/low art" discussion is timeworn. It goes on and on. And there is
CTyankee
Apr 2012
#58
Except that the people doing the pile-on seemed to make it about his art.
Tommy_Carcetti
Apr 2012
#28
He should have just done a "Piss Christ" and others would have loved him
The Straight Story
Apr 2012
#59
it's outrageous that Kinkaide was rewarded with million$ for his unoriginal appeals
librechik
Apr 2012
#72
lots of hypocrisy out there; this guy's hypocrisy seems to have spawned threads all out of
HiPointDem
Apr 2012
#113