In search of Thomas Kinkade

Thomas Kinkade had many faces: the devout Christian who painted God’s light; the mercenary businessman, sued by more than a few of his 350 franchisees; the volatile drinker, subject to a gamut of allegations for his intoxicated behaviour.

The more time I spent talking to people who knew Kinkade, the more difficult it became to build a cohesive image of the man himself. I imagined I would find a deeper truth, if I burrowed far enough. This didn’t happen. What started as a study of the life of the most successful artist you’ve never heard of turned into an investigation of a deeply fragmented persona, filled with disparate, competing characterisations.

In search of Thomas Kinkade, I have encountered questions about authenticity, identity and the performances we expect of public figures. In many ways, I know less about Kinkade now than I did when I started. In place of an answer to the question of who he really is, I found a cautionary tale about the flattening lens of the public eye and the devastation that it can wreak on a person’s character and legacy.

I: My Art Got Saved

You might not have heard Kinkade’s name before, but you’ve probably seen his work. His career lasted 40 years, from the early 1980s until his death in 2012, during which he produced thousands of twee images inspired by the English countryside and 19th-century landscape painting. They contain sleepy cottages, glowing from the inside and bathed in dappled mists, usually surrounded by beds of flowers, woodland creatures and babbling brooks. Almost always painted from his imagination, they depict a platonic ideal of domestic bliss. Joan Didion wrote that his cottages display “such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel.”

Kinkade the man also seemed too wholesome to be true. Born in 1958 in Placerville, California, he was raised by a single mother, with his brother Patrick and sister Katie. Coincidentally, artist Glenn Wessels moved his studio next door to a teenage Kinkade’s home and quickly became his artistic mentor. Some years later, while studying at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, Kinkade had his religious awakening. He became a devout believer and a family man, who gave all four of his children the middle name “Christian”. His faith also guided his work; his principal motif became light, emanating from skies and windows, a symbol of the higher power that he had found. Art For Everybody, a 2023 documentary on his life, shows footage of him saying “when I got saved, my art got saved. That was the point at which God’s light began to infuse my paintings.” He called himself the ‘Painter of Light’, a title that he went on to protect with a trademark.

Rather than sell originals, Kinkade had his work reprinted on paper, canvas and all manner of consumer goods including mouse mats, china dishes, La-Z Boy sofas and bed linen. These were mostly sold via the QVC shopping channel and a network of franchised Thomas Kinkade Galleries, usually located in shopping malls, numbering hundreds at the peak of his success. Accessibility was key. You didn’t need to be a rich gallery-goer to acquire one of his works — just to have a few dollars and a Kinkade concession nearby. Apparently, at one point, one in 20 American homes contained his work.

II: Outside of Art

Despite his magnificent success, Kinkade’s name is rarely mentioned in today’s art world. His operation was antithetical to the aesthetics and values of contemporary art; he rejected its brainy conceptualism and it rejected him. In Art For Everybody, LA Times art critic Christopher Knight explains the relationship: “I wasn’t paying attention to him, there was no reason to. He found a niche that was outside of art.”

Alexis Boylan, art history professor and author of Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall is interested in Kinkade’s place within wider culture. She explained to me how his work can be understood as a reaction to the kind of intellectualised, Godless art that fills museums: “He was against a kind of modern art that people didn’t understand, against a kind of art that he saw as being self-reflective and masturbatory. He talked about it as being about elite, anti-communal, anti-religion ideals.”

It’s an artistic binary that runs in parallel to a familiar refrain from right-wing political populism: brainy art made for and by out-of-touch cultural elites on one side; accessible, family-friendly art that makes everybody feel warm inside on the other. In a 2001 New Yorker profile written by Susan Orlean, Kinkade reacts to the critics that call him irrelevant: “Yes,” he says, “irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s my point: my art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people.”

Ironically, it was this article that eventually led to Kinkade’s first and only exhibition at a respected art gallery. He wagered Orlean a million dollars that he wouldn’t receive such a show during his lifetime. News of this bet found its way to the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California, where someone – for some reason – took it upon themselves to challenge Kinkade’s certainty. Thus, ‘Heaven on Earth,’ a survey of his work curated by artist Jeffrey Vallance, took place there in 2004.

III: Aknik and Kinkade

Whilst working on the exhibition, Vallance and Kinkade became friends. Vallance’s practice is centred around the ideas of branding, identity and the quasi-iconic status that mass-produced objects and images can take on. Naturally, he took a shine to the Painter of Light™. To him, the character that Kinkade painted himself as — the pious artist making work to bring God into the home of the American everyman – felt like a performance. “I started telling him that his work was kind of like conceptual art, kind of like performance art and he was really into hearing that”, he explained to me…“I don’t think anyone had ever told him that.”

He says that around this time, Ed Aknik, Kinkade’s bad boy biker alter ego, began making appearances. Aknik can be seen in a video taken on the set of the 2008 straight-to-video biopic Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage. “Who wants a painting of a cottage?” he asks. “If I want a painting, I want a painting of a chick.” He wears a leather jacket and blue wraparound sunglasses, his downward-slanting eyebrows giving him the impression of being perpetually confused and angry. Standing next to his impressive-looking chopper, he looks the opposite of the Kinkade that I knew.

Acknowledging, like Vallance did, the performativity of Thomas Kinkade’s public persona, makes Aknik easy to understand. He’d already played the saint, so why not try out another role for size? Chandler, one of Kinkade’s daughters, told me that he used Aknik “as a fun, interactive way to connect with and engage with the world around him.”

Generally speaking, the media and the public have little attention span to take stock of the nuances of real people, so those in the public eye are forced to present abbreviated, idealised versions of themselves. Kinkade’s squeak-clean persona was the perfect outward facing character, one-dimensional enough to be marketable. Aknik was a necessary counterbalance – an outlet where the real man could express his darker side.

IV: Saint, Bad Boy, Family Man, Businessman

Kinkade died in 2012, aged 54. The coroner’s report listed “acute ethanol and Diazepam intoxication” as the cause of death.

Soon after, Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade took him into his studio and opened a secret door, revealing piles of work completely unlike the saccharine scenes that he had seen. “They were dark in colour, and dark psychologically,” he told me. Weeks later, he decided to tell Kinkade’s family about the dream. “Did he show you that room?” they asked. It was real.

Vallance was invited to see Kinkade’s “vault”, where he found paintings and drawings of ugly, distorted faces, isolated figures and dusky, barren landscapes devoid of flora and fauna. He also found reams of written notes. One contained a diagram of “the four sides of Thomas Kinkade.”

“Saint, bad boy, family man, businessman,” it read. Not all of these alter egos were as innocuous as Aknik.

In business, Kinkade was guided not by God’s light but by a brutal capitalistic instinct: he wanted it all. A friend of his explained to me: “how many times do you go out to dinner with someone who orders two entrées? He was a large man, but he wasn’t just hungry. He did that because of FOMO.”

A 2006 Los Angeles Times article outlines a number of court cases brought against his company by ex-partners who accused him of using religion as a tool to manipulate them into making ill-judged investments in his network of local dealers. Though Kinkade denied these allegations, an arbitration panel found his company guilty of fraud, commenting that he and other executives created “a certain religious environment designed to instil a special relationship of trust.”

Kinkade also suffered with addiction, and is reported to have shown another side when drinking. The Times article lists allegations from various ex-colleagues that include groping, verbal abuse and, bizarrely, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue during a visit to a Disneyland Hotel. Though prolifically reported in the media, this is a side that Vallance suspects we still don’t know the extent of: “I just have this feeling that there’s a lot more darkness that no one dares speak about.”

The various threads of his character were more stratified than I had thought. Aknik could be rationalised as an outlet for a natural and harmless wild streak. These new sides, completely incompatible with the evangelical public image, obfuscate the already complex picture that I had been building of him.

V: An Unknowable Quantity

Could there still be a way to tease an authentic self out of Kinkade’s four sides? “I bristle at the idea of there ever being an authentic self, or that any of us would ever be able to identify that for ourselves. What is mine or your authentic self, in my view, is an unknowable quantity,” Boylan says.

The end of Kinkade’s story might be understood as a victory for his dark side. In the end, he wasn’t such a saint after all. According to Boylan: “there were a lot of people who took a lot of glee in it, as though it might reveal that he was just selling false goods all along and all the people who loved him were just dupes.” The reality is more complex.

We are all multifaceted, a number of characters rolled into our personalities. Public figures aren’t allowed to be so complex — often, they need to select a single character to dress up and present to the world. Kinkade adopted one that matched his art: the saint, the family man. But the darker sides of his character, those that, in some capacity, we all have, didn’t disappear. Locked out of sight, they grew in strange and unhealthy ways. When they could no longer be hidden, they sabotaged his persona and, ultimately, killed him.

In my search for Thomas Kinkade, I found a few different people. Fame and success acted like a centrifuge, forcing his identity to split into a set of separate components, each one as stark and unrealistic as the next. As we’ve seen, Kinkade was many things. Above all, though, I see his story as a kind of fable; a reminder of the impossibility that anyone’s identity might be wholly cohesive, and a warning about the chaos that ensues when we try to make it so.