Hissy Cat

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March 07, 2006

Painter of Light: A Portrait of Darkness (or, "Codpiece! Codpiece!")

I have always suspected that Thomas Kincaid is a fountainhead of pure, unbridled evil, but now I finally, finally have confirmation. If you are lucky enough to live in America and not know of Thomas Kincaid, he is the "painter of light" whose overpriced Christian schlock sells in, I think, malls, but also, like Pebble Beach and wherever else rich, white people without an aesthetic bone in their body can be found purchasing mass-reproduced "art" to match their wall-to-wall to carpeting. The best way I can describe Thomas Kincaid paintings is: imagine Oprah eating Dr. Phil, a Madame Alexander doll, an evangelical mega-church complete with Power-Point sermon, 839,459 Pixie Stix, then vomiting all that up into a gold-leaf frame and swishing so it will cake into vomity swirls of texture as it hardens. That's what his paintings look like. See:

But now the jig is up! According to the LA Times "Some former Kinkade employees, gallery operators and others contend that the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side." It goes on about fraud and, I don't know, maybe money laundering, and all sorts of bad things, and blah di blah blah blah blah. "A three-member panel of the American Arbitration Assn. ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries." Right, whatever. This is the shit I live for:

It's not just Kinkade's business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he's built his empire.

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.

The article goes on for a while about how Kincaid (someone stop me) paints himself as an upstanding Christian before coming back to elaborate on the Sigfriend & Roy incident-- even though you already know about that-- because it is just soo bizarre.

In testimony and interviews with The Times, Sheppard and other former employees said they often went with Kinkade to strip clubs and bars, where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control.

John Dandois, Media Arts Group's senior director of retail operations from 1995 to 1999, testified in a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.

"Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn't tell where the boundary was," he said. "And then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff."

Dandois, who left the company to become chief executive of a group of galleries owned by Kinkade's brother, Patrick, recounted that about six years ago the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas that people seated nearby moved away from him.

"I think it was Roy or Siegfried or whatever had a codpiece in his leotards," Dandois testified. "And so when the show started, Thom just started yelling, 'Codpiece, codpiece,' and had to be quieted by his mother and Nanette."

This is really too much. I think I broke my lung.

In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s for the artist's appearance on the "Hour of Power" television show at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. On the eve of the broadcast, Sheppard said, he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking. As they walked to their rooms, according to Sheppard and another person who was there, Kinkade veered toward a nearby figure of a Disney character.

"Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to 'mark his territory,' " Sheppard told The Times.

In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he "grew up in the country" where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said it might have happened.

"There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don't recall it," he said.

Posted by hissycat at March 7, 2006 06:15 AM

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