I'm in another not-quite-Pepsi-generation motel tonight along a somewhat tortuous way. There are slot machines in here somewhere and the reception desk bore a sign when I checked in, advising of a "loud band" (and so of course I immediately said, "Sure, okay, and where will I be able to find that band later?") - but Kinkade keeps coming up like one of those floating answers in that old "8 ball" ouija-type game ("Will I ever make it as an artist?" "Maybe, but don't quit playing blackjack.")
I don't happen to like the more commercially popular Kinkade pieces. I don't think they're bad, I just find them somewhat uninteresting, unengaging and (and I'll echo what Chris Saper just said, without trying to put words in her mouth) beneath what he's capable of doing. I've seen Kinkade's original plein air oil sketches, and I stood there slack-jawed and almost sad that someone who could do THAT was doing (as I point to the prints up in the front part of the gallery) THAT. This isn't a guy who can't do better, he's a brilliant marketeer who has discovered what sells, and now he's rich. In that same breath, I have to say that I don't regard the Kinkades of the art world to be "competition", I don't think they're taking money away from me, because the folks who want his prints probably wouldn't be interested in my style of landscape. So be it.
I worked in an extremely intensive atelier in which one of the students had to (surprise!) pay the rent back at the apartment, and he did it by being what in the Kinkade empire is known as a Master Highlighter. For those who aren't aware of the process, Kinkade giclee prints are usually "highlighted," or touched up after printing, generally at the "factory" but occasionally at special Kinkade Gallery events at which a "Master Highlighter" sits with paints ready to listen to and then execute a purchaser's request for additional highlighting of various parts of the painting. This takes place in the "lights", and so the flowers' patina or the fire's glow gets that certain something that is what makes you look twice at the Kinkades, even if you've already decided you don't like them. I found it quite fascinating, especially as I watched the expressions on the very happy purchasers' faces. I would be the very last to suggest that those folks were being conned. They were getting exactly what they wanted.
One of the best-known popular artists in Australia is a fellow named Ken Done, who does rather primitive, some might say infantile, renderings in brilliant minimal palettes of much-recognized cultural icons such as the Sydney Opera House and the like. The capital-A artists of Australia (I'm generalizing now) treat him with contempt, and in a recent compilation of the 2 or 3 thousand notable Aussie artists, he was left out. And he makes an absolute ton of dough from his work and his wife, a fashion designer, prints his stuff on blouses and skirts and tea towels and hats and she makes a ton of dough too, and everyone goes away happy, except the capital-A, black-shirted Artistes in the community. Good on Kinkade, I say, and good on Ken Done. They found a niche, they mastered it, they capitalized upon it, and what great fun they've had.
My kids are sick to death of my dragging them through art galleries, but when I took my son to a Kinkade gallery at Minneapolis's Mall of America a few years ago, he was absolutely enamored of the paintings (not the "good" ones I mentioned earlier, the "popular" ones). And you know, I was so pleasantly surprised that this then-12-year-old was actually excited about a painting and was telling ME about the way the darks and lights contrasted and that's what made that firelight setting interesting, I realized that I had my own pettiness to expiate. He only got a refrigerator magnet out of the visit, but he was most pleased with it.
I just bought a beautiful giclee Montana landscape print on canvas from a impossibly successful fellow in my hometown, and during a discussion about why he was marketing so much of his work as relatively inexpensive prints, he told me that he'd decided 25 years ago to let people have access to his paintings even if they couldn't afford the originals, and so he vowed to himself never to overprice or get too precious about his reproduction market. God bless him. I didn't show that giclee to one single person in two weeks without having to explain that it wasn't an original, yet I bought it for about 1/15 of the price of the original. A brilliant artist (Mark Ogle, see
www.markogle.com) and a brillaint marketeer, and I don't begrudge him any of it. In fact, I'm keenly re-energized in my own pursuit of landscape work, by his attitude, as well as his competence.
We all have to develop our competence in the studio and then further develop our competence in sharing with the world what we've done (or what we can do for prospective clients). But I can't find any room at all in my outlook for jealousy of those who have acquired mastery in both arenas before I did. It just means I have more work to do.
Cheers to all, after (and before) a hiatus,