Between Light and Illusion: Remembering Tom Kinkade

On art, honesty, and illusion

I was acquainted with Thomas Kinkade in art school. He was good friends with Jim Gurney, also at Art Center, and the two of them wrote a terrific book together, The Artist’s Guide to Sketching.

I was surprised and maybe a little jealous, when Tom went on to have massive success, especially since the person he presented publicly was nothing like the person I knew. People who read this Substack know that although I was raised in the Christian Science church, I’m not a believer in a supreme being. I’m best labeled an atheist. So I was struck when Tom came forward as extremely Christian, even signing his paintings with the Ichthys, a fish symbol of Christian faith. When I knew him, he didn’t have a hint of religiosity about him. I suspect his embrace of Christianity was fake.

This came to me clearly when I visited my high school girlfriend, Beth Winzenried. I hadn’t seen her in years, and at some point I asked who her favorite painter was. She answered, “Tom Kinkade.” For middle America, his cottages and snow-capped mountains had made him the most popular living painter. What bothered me is that people had been sold a lie.

I don’t agree with people who run their lives by religious belief, but I have even less patience for people who exploit that belief to make money. Tom presented himself as a devout Christian, but in private he took drugs, drank, and had affairs. We all have our faults, but very few people position themselves as the extreme embodiment of one virtue while living the opposite in private.

Many artists are terrible people. If you love Caravaggio as much as I do, never read about his private life. Picasso by all accounts left a lot to be desired as a human being. Even Rembrandt, one of the greatest painters who ever lived, had a messy personal life. None of that stops me from enjoying their work, but none of them marketed themselves as paragons of virtuous living.

I love Monet’s work, and in some ways Tom’s resembles his, with the same broken color and soft edges. But Monet avoided the sentimentality that pervades Tom’s paintings. Monet let the subject speak for itself. I think people embraced his work because it conjured a world that never existed with no violence, no conflict, no racism.

Some might call me a hypocrite for loving Norman Rockwell’s work, after all, didn’t he do the same thing? I don’t think so. Rockwell didn’t just paint two people praying, rather he set them in a coffee shop with everyone around them looking on in confusion.

He didn’t just paint an optimistic young man gazing toward the future, rather he painted that young man beside his father waiting for a train, one looking forward, the other looking back. The older you get the better that picture is.

With Rockwell, the more you study the picture, the deeper it gets. With Tom, the more you study it, the shallower it gets. Rockwell had an edge as he thought deeply about his pictures. Tom’s pictures pour on the syrup, then add an extra dollop for good measure.

Which brings me to Tom’s friend, Jim Gurney. As much as it galls my cynical side to admit it, Jim is the real deal. After his success with Dinotopia, I kept waiting for him to dump his wife, move to LA, start dating a supermodel, and buy a Ferrari.

It never happened.

He’s one of the few genuinely nice people I know, without a cynical bone in his body. I don’t know Jim’s religious affiliation, if he has one, but if you wanted a model for how to live a Christian life, you could do worse than Jim Gurney. He writes a Substack that’s one of the few I read regularly (besides my own). If you’re an artist, you should too:

He’s privately good and publicly good. Tom, by contrast, performed the life of a saint in public while living quite differently behind closed doors. I’m certainly not a perfect person myself. I’ve probably broken eight of the ten commandments (no murder or adultery, yet). But I’ve never sold a fake image of myself to get people to buy my paintings.

You can buy signed prints of any of my paintings here:

www.davidmattingly.com

If you buy enough of my prints, I’ll even convert to Christianity!!