Kinkade

[danalwyn]

I'm not really a big fan of Thomas Kinkade. I don't hate him necessarily, but honestly about three of those pictures would have been enough, and I would never buy any of them. As a fan of landscapes, I find Kinkade's to be not only overdone, but bland and boring. There's not enough depth and breadth of vision to provide entertainment, and what depth of background there is usually ends up nearly invisible, muted behind the trademark fuzzy glow.

So it should come as no surprise that I really like Roland Deschane.

Comments

[quicksilver_ink]

These are highly amusing.

The lighting always bothers me with Kinkade's work. There's something not-right about it -- we see too much glow from the cottages than we should be able to make out as lit given the ambient lighting.

[danalwyn]

It's like it's supposed to look like someone put a light behind the picture and that it's just shining through or something. It's a bit weird to look at, and so patiently artificial that it knocks you out of the picture.

[silverjackal]

Kinkade bothers me on a visceral level. It's not just that I dislike how cutesy and twee it is -- the colours are wrong, there's too much light coming from too many places (that is shouldn't be), it's too "perfect". I think I find it akin to a drug or fever-vision, which at any moment is going to dissolve and give way to the Lovecraftian horror beneath. Or so I tell myself, because it has another flaw: it is profoundly *boring*. I like your versions better.

[danalwyn]

It's almost manifestly unreal. It's almost like looking at an impressionist painting, except for the impressionist you have the feeling that you're not supposed to have a picture perfect reproduction. This looks like it's supposed to be realistic until you look closer and realize that there's no substance there, that there are no details of interest. It's just ... bright.

[silverjackal]

I think you've just helped me work out another aspect of why I don't like Kinkade's stuff. With Impressionist art a great deal is about conveying the feeling evoked by the subject as opposed to seeing the subject a particular way. With Kinkade's "art" there's no emotion linked to the images, just a shell-shape (albeit a precise one) to gaze upon, like a window decal on a vechicle.