by Susan Orlean
Not only the highlighters, but the gallery staff, the Media Arts receptionists, even the people who build the frames and stretch the canvases know Kinkade’s biography by heart: that he was raised in Placerville, California; that his father left home when Thomas was five; that his mother told him he would be the man of the family. That he was good at everything he tried—math, civics, and especially drawing—that when he was about fourteen he set up a little concession selling his drawings for two dollars each, and that every time he sold one he would marvel at how he could make money on something that had taken him only fifteen minutes to do. That he went to what he jokingly calls “a nice little conservative Christian school,” Berkeley, and left after two years to attend the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. That when he was twenty he experienced a Christian awakening and that it changed his art—it stopped being about his fears and anxieties and became optimistic and inspirational, with themes like hometowns and perfect days and natural beauty, and millions of people responded. It’s as good a story as you could hope for if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life’s bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it’s easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.
Kinkade’s commercial awakening occurred in 1989, when he formed Lightpost Publishing with a business partner, Ken Raasch. His paintings were selling well, but he decided that he wanted “to engulf as many hearts as possible with art,” a goal that would be hindered by selling only original work. Instead, Kinkade opened a chain of galleries and began producing high-quality digital reproductions of his paintings on specially treated paper, which sold for a few hundred dollars each. A digital image could also be soaked in water, peeled off the paper, and affixed to a stretched canvas, so that it showed the texture of the canvas the way a real painting would. These canvas transfers could be sold as they were, or they could be accented with paint by a master highlighter or by a special apprentice to Kinkade (“Studio Proofs” and “Renaissance Editions”) or by Kinkade himself (“Masters Editions”); the transfers now fetch anywhere from fifteen hundred dollars for the standard numbered editions to thirty-four thousand dollars for the prints that Kinkade highlighted himself. The originals were no longer for sale at any price, and the number of each edition was restricted, and the image was “suspended” once it was sold out.
In 1994, Kinkade was named Artist of the Year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers, and the demand for his pictures was growing so fast that he was able to take his company public. Business Week named it one of the “hot growth” companies of 1995. A Kinkade picture had become “collectible”—one of the countless items valued not just for their own merits, but for their supposed rarity and potential to appreciate because they have been intentionally produced in a restricted quantity. According to a 1999 survey, the collectibles market is worth an estimated ten billion dollars a year. The market includes limited-edition Boyds Bears, which are costumed teddies; Adam Binder’s Fruit Faeries, which are marble-powder-and-resin creatures with names like Humble Umhalubhala the Apple Faerie; the Ebony Visions sculptures of Thomas Blackshear, who describes his work as Afro-Nouveau; a series called Just the Right Shoe, which are miniature right shoes in different styles, made by an artist who calls herself Raine; and all varieties of dolls and unicorn figures and paperweights and Olszewski Miniatures and Cameo Girls vases and Snowbabies and Precious Moments moppets and Steinbach limited-edition nutcrackers, and, of course, Hummel figurines.
There are scores of limited-edition painters in addition to Kinkade, and they account for some seven hundred million dollars of the collectibles market each year. They include every sort of landscape and still-life painter, and wildlife and marine-life painter, and Christian-themed painter, and sports painter (and at least one multidimensional painter, Arnold Friberg, whose subject matter is described on one website as ranging from “the Bible to American football”).
Kinkade is not the only multimillionaire among the limited-edition artists: Bev Doolittle, whose art is described by dealers as whimsical, mystical, and spiritual, has sold sixty million dollars’ worth of prints in the last decade; Wyland (“the world’s premier ocean artist”) has sold more than fifty million dollars’ worth of whale pictures; Terry Redlin, according to Time magazine, sells twenty million dollars’ worth of Americana images each year. Like Kinkade, Redlin has stopped selling his originals. He now displays them in the Redlin Art Center in Watertown, South Dakota, which opened in 1997 and drew four hundred thousand visitors in its first six months. According to the museum’s website, “Certainly no one would disagree that Terry’s artwork, which holds such a special place in the homes and hearts of so many Americans, should be preserved in a public setting.” Redlin’s limited editions—“Affordable Decorator Art by Terry Redlin,” as one dealer advertises it—are available instead, although only just available. Because they are expensive and might “sell out,” the prints seem more precious than ordinary reproductions that are issued in unlimited quantity.
People like to own things they think are valuable, and they are titillated by the prospect that the things they own might be even more valuable than they thought. The high price of limited editions is part of their appeal: It implies that they are choice and exclusive and that only a certain class of people will be able to afford them—a limited edition of people with taste and discernment.
“I created a system of marketing compatible with American art,” Kinkade said to me recently. “I believe in ‘aspire to’ art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It’s good to dream about things. It’s like dreaming of owning a Rolex—instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print.” In fact, a lot of limited-edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade.
LAST MAY, I visited the Media Arts Group headquarters, in a plain brown building in a commercial district near San José Airport. Inside, the office had the décor that characterizes all the Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries: The furniture was plump and chintz covered, and the walls were a soothing forest green, and a gas flame in the fireplace lapped at a ceramic log, so that whether you were in a mall in central New Jersey or an industrial park in Northern California, you would feel you had entered Thomas Kinkade’s world, where it is always a dusky autumn evening in a small but prosperous English town. The day I visited was actually hot, dry, and blindingly bright, the height of spring in the middle of Silicon Valley, and dust from airport construction gave the air a blurry glow. I had come at a lively moment for Media Arts: The company had recently launched a new chain of stores called the Masters of Light Galleries, featuring three artists whose work had been selected from the more than two thousand who applied. The Masters of Light Galleries are part of a plan to diversify Media Arts Group, because stock analysts have worried about the company’s reliance on one charismatic figure and about the possibility that Kinkade’s popularity has crested and will inevitably ebb, his paintings going the way of so many collectibles before them.
“Analysts are fascinated by the company,” Craig Fleming, the Media Arts CEO, explained. (Fleming has since left Media Arts.) “But they were never excited about the company based on just Thom. Now, with the diversification, they’re starting to do due diligence and pay attention to the stock.”
Fleming is not an art guy. He was a sales guy who came to Media Arts after twenty-five years of working for nutritional product companies, home party businesses, and the Kirby vacuum-cleaning company. He said that when he first got to Media Arts, he wo
uld go around asking, “What’s our number one product?” and would then supply the answer himself: “Our number one product is the Thomas Kinkade business opportunity!” In 1998, shortly after he took over, the stock price pitched downward, suffering from the industry’s weakness, the company’s overexpansion, and Wall Street’s coolness toward small-cap companies. Fleming oversaw the sale of most company-owned galleries; all but two Thomas Kinkade galleries are now owned by franchisees. According to a recent quarterly report, the company also developed “a new retail promotional event involving appearances by Thomas Kinkade at selected Galleries which substantially reduced the decline in same store sales, increased product pull-through, lowered retail inventory, improved accounts receivable and strengthened our cash position.” In other words, wherever Kinkade appears, customers buy pictures.
“Thom will go to a gallery, and twenty-five hundred people will show up,” Fleming said. “He speaks for about thirty minutes, and afterward they come up to him and talk. It’s very emotional, some of them are crying and saying, ‘Here’s how you have affected me.’ ” He paused and then gestured toward a large Kinkade hanging in his office. “We believe that the walls of the home are the new frontier for branding. Thom always says that there are forty walls in the average home. Our job is to fill them.”
Last month, Taylor Woodrow Homes and Media Arts Group opened the Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, a gated development in Vallejo, California. According to promotional material, it is a “magical community” featuring “meandering sidewalks, benches and water features, which are designed to enrich home owners’ lives with endless visual surprises and delights.” There are four house models available, and they are named after Kinkade’s four daughters—Chandler, Merritt, Everett, and Winsor—and will be priced from four hundred thousand dollars up.
THOMAS KINKADE LIVES in a large, handsome house in a magical suburban community the name of which I am not at liberty to disclose. It is easy to understand his wish for privacy: Ten million people own some product featuring his name, and most editions are signed with ink containing DNA from his hair or blood, to prevent fakes. He likes to say he has a retro—“but not Amish”—lifestyle. His children are homeschooled by his wife, Nanette, and they don’t watch television, but he owns “a hell of a lot of stuff, a nice car and so forth.” He works in an old stone cottage on the grounds of his house. The cottage is filled with his favorite paintings: an original by his idol, Norman Rockwell; a seascape by Glenn Wessels, who taught him art when he was a teenager; a pastel by his father, an amateur artist who, according to Kinkade, never made anything of his life. In the main room of the cottage are easels, shelves of reference books, and a high-tech color-balanced lighting system that provides the constant effect of overcast midday sun. At the time, Kinkade was working on a painting of two horses grazing in the yard of a trim stone cottage. The horses weren’t finished yet, and next to the easel he had pinned a photograph of a horse that appeared to have been torn out of a cigarette ad. The room was clean and orderly and didn’t smell of turpentine or brush cleaner.
“I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people,” he said, sitting on a sofa across the room from the easels. “The number one quote critics give me is, ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.” He sat up and started to laugh. “I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was, ‘The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.’ And you know, that’s the dead art we don’t want anything to do with!” He laughed again and slapped his thighs. “We’re the art of life, man! We’re bringing the life back to art!”
The door of his studio opened and a slight blond girl walked in. “Daddy, how do you spell ‘schedule’?”
“That’s an important question,” Kinkade said. “S-c-h-e-d-u-l-e, honey.” The girl drifted out of the room. “The fact is we have a grassroots movement emerging in my art and in the country, and there’s ten million people out there that if I give the word will go out and picket any museum I want them to,” he went on. “I won’t give the word, but they’re dying to have an art of dignity within our culture, an art of relevance to them. Look at someone like Robert Rauschenberg. What’s his Q rating? How many people have his art? A hundred? Where is the million-seller art? What about the craftsmanship of expression?”
I asked him why he even cared how the art establishment viewed him, since it hadn’t had any effect on his work.
“It’s irritating,” he said. He cocked his head and grinned. “I’m thinking of starting this program of loaning a few of my paintings to some of these critics and letting them live with them for a year or two and see what they think then. Because art really grows as you live with it. See, I have faith in the heart of the average person. People find hope and comfort in my paintings. I think showing people the ugliness of the world doesn’t help it. I think pointing the way to light is deeply contagious and satisfying. I would want to argue that I’m not an antagonist to modernists. I just believe in picture making for people. I’m a firebrand. I will sit down and debate the grand tradition with anyone. I am really the most controversial artist in the world.”
I asked him what he would have done with his life if he hadn’t become a painter. “What would I have done?” he repeated, gazing across the room. “I would have probably become a motivational speaker.”
WHEN I WAS IN THE GALLERY in Bridgewater, I wandered into the stockroom. I had toured the manufacturing area of Media Arts in California and had watched a crew of Hispanic workers peel images off wet paper and smooth them onto canvases and then slide them onto racks like pies set out to cool. Now, in the Bridgewater stockroom, I came across a stack of boxes fresh from the factory, with the names of the pictures scribbled on the side: one Light in the Storm, one Clearing Storms, two Conquering the Storms, and one Sea of Tranquility.
By then, it was midday. Several more paintings had been highlighted and taken away by their owners; Glenda was now sitting with a man and a woman, meek and awkward, their new painting, Clocktower Cottage, on the highlighting stand.
“Is this your first Kinkade?” Glenda asked. They nodded. “Well, congratulations. Let me tell you a little about what is here. This is about the changes of time. You see, everything changes. The sky changes, and the clouds change, and life changes.” They leaned in so that they could follow Glenda’s finger as she pointed to details in the picture. “Do you see this?” she asked, resting her finger on the clocktower. “Here the clock says five oh-two, which is Thom and Nanette’s wedding date. And here are the initials NK—that’s for his wife, that’s how he honors her. It’s his love language for her.”
They were transfixed now. Glenda took a brush and dipped it in the green paint, then with quick, short strokes dappled the underside of a tree. It was just a touch, but the tree suddenly stood out from the other trees, and it seemed newly bright and full. “Wow!” the man said. He glanced at his wife and then back at the picture. “I hadn’t even noticed that before.”
Intensive Care
These are the questions I’ve been asked since I worked on Show No. 6079 of All My Children, which will be broadcast on Tuesday, June 29:
Q: What’s Susan Lucci like?
A: Perky, sharp, thin, underappreciated—but I’m just speculating, since she wasn’t in my episode.
Q: What was your part?
A: I was a nurse. I appear in act three, in the hospital sun porch scene, and I say, in a mean voice, “Intensive care patients are only allowed two visitors per hour,” and then, “We don’t want to overtax him,” and, finally, “Rules are rules.” I say this to Hayley, to stop her from seeing Adam, who is in intensive care after he and Natalie are in a car wreck while spe
eding to someone’s wedding—I forget whose—after Natalie has had a big fight with Trevor, who has recently discovered he was duped by Laurel Banning, who then mysteriously disappears, although she—Laurel—has just sent a note to Natalie’s son Timmy, which he reads to An Li, Tom, Trevor, and Myrtle, who are sitting around keeping one another company and are beginning to suspect that Jack and Laurel might have eloped.
Q: Wait a minute—what were Adam and Natalie doing in a car together? They hate each other!
A: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.
Q: What did you wear?
A: A white pinafore, a white blouse with big shoulder pads, homely white oxfords, white pantyhose, tasteful jewelry, no hat. I was hoping I’d be dressed in something skimpy, but the costume department informed me that only one nurse on the show is ever allowed to wear something really tight and short, and that’s Nurse Gloria.
Q: Why?
A: I have no idea. I’d never seen the show.
Q: What’s going to happen to Adam and Natalie?
A: The powerful and mercurial Adam, who is married to Nurse Gloria, and is the twin of shy, gentle Stuart, discovers he can’t move his legs, although in real life he went jogging between the morning camera blocking and the afternoon dress rehearsal. I get the feeling he will recover. Natalie, on the other hand, is definitely going to die. I was told this by Natalie herself while I was having my hair done and she was getting her head bruise applied. “I’m flatlining either this Thursday or next—I can’t remember which,” she said. “Natalie’s sweet, so she’s got to die. If you’re on a soap, you want to be a bitch or be miserable, because then you’ll last forever.”
Q: How were you?
A: Really good. In fact, Conal O’Brien, the director, told me that I was “very steady” and that the sixteen million people who watch the show will probably appreciate my work. And this is a guy who can be tough: For instance, during camera blocking, he told Christopher Lawford—Charlie—that he was giving the camera “too much tush.”
