Turning On the Light

One of the truly (and rather recently) famous citizens of Placerville was Thomas Kinkade, who emerged in the early 1980s with his detailed and nostalgic paintings of small town settings––dozens of which are based on various corners of Placerville and the foothills.  He has painted Main Street, Placerville, several times––the most famous of all being the painting commissioned for the El Dorado County library, prints of which were sold for a nominal fee to help raise money for the new library, but now sell for quite a bit of money.  The original is still a prize attraction of the Library.

Little did Kinkade think that he would have a gallery devoted to his work on  Main Street, Placerville when he was growing up with his brother, Patrick and single mother.  They lived in a cute little house that needed repairs, but that has been preserved on canvas as the idealized “Christmas Cottage.” There is also a rather uneven, saccharine, semi-biographical film about growing up in Placerville by the same name that stars Marsha Gay Harden as his mother and Peter O’Toole as his neighbor and art mentor, Glenn Wessels.  Jared Padalecki plays Kinkade as a college age student, who returns home when money runs out for school and helps Placerville get out of the 1970s recession by painting a mural of Main Street on the side of a building.  This never happened of course, but a similar happening occurred with that library painting.  The film also mentions the mayor’s plan to call Placerville the “Christmas Tree Capital of the World” to wake up the sleepy town by enticing a tourist trade.  We know that actually happened.

The disappointing thing about the film is that although Placerville is practically a supporting character in the story, none of it is shot in Placerville or any place that looks particularly like it.  There aren’t even any authentic exterior establishing shots edited in.  Some day it would be nice to see a story about Placerville that actually used Placerville, though it would most likely be about the Gold Rush and so it would have to be recreated as a movie set anyway.

Thomas Kinkade graduated from El Dorado High in 1976 and went on to study at U.C. Berkley at the suggestion of Glenn Wessels.  Wessels was a prolific artist that retired next door to the Kinkade’s in his 80s and was willing to pass on his knowledge of painting to young Thomas, who was a relentless sketcher as a child.  He always had pencils and paper in hand and carried a small sketch book with him all through his life––never knowing when the next inspiration would hit him and he’d need to get it down on paper immediately.

Kinkade only made it through Berkley for two years and then attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.  After college he and friend James Gurney set out on a cross country trip, ending in New York, where they scored a job writing The Artist’s Guide to Sketching for Guptill Publications.  The book was very successful and brought them to the attention of Ralph Bakshi Studios to work on backgrounds for the animated film, Fire and Ice in 1983.  From this point, Kinkade’s paintings started to sell in various California galleries and prints became in demand.

Two things really distinguish Thomas Kinkade’s work.  Foremost is his quality of light at dusk and dawn, especially coming from street lamps and windows.  His branding is that he is “the painter of light.”  Branding is the other thing that distinguishes his work, for he found a way to make a great deal of money during his lifetime by diversifying the business of painting canvases.   His images appear on anything that will take them: mugs, jewelry, sculptures, greeting cards, posters, calendars, journals and more.  Even recently I found a sale table of boxed Christmas cards with one of the Placerville Victorians by Kinkade on it for $3.50 at a Walgreens down the street from me in Queens, NY.  His image as a mass producer of art may lower his stature for some, but he was simply a very good business man and no one paints quite like him.  Or do they?

There is the Thomas Kinkade Studio where apprentice artists are employed to add oils to give that extra magical glow on copies of his originals and they are all mentored to paint with his techniques.  The company that is now “Thomas Kinkade” plans to continue to release new “Kinkades” thanks to the small army of artists who can put out the paintings in the same style.  In a way it’s like the release of a Disney film without the actual Walt Disney there to have produced it.  The brand survives even if the originator is gone.  Unlike Van Gogh or Matisse, at least Thomas Kinkade was able to know financial success during his life time.

Kinkade said he never painted any two paintings the same way and he was always interested in developing new techniques, even utilizing new technologies to help him in his work.  If he could find a time saving way of achieving the same effect that used to take him longer, he would employ it.  He was not only interested in quality, which shows, but he was also interested in quantity, because he was sales minded.  Kinkade was never just an artist for art’s sake, but he was determined to never go back to his family’s life of struggle when he was growing up in the 1970s.

Mainly, Kinkade made a series of sketches, sometimes individually sketching the smaller details of a tree or a person that would end up in the bigger painting.  Once he finished a final sketch he transferred it to canvas mounted on hardboard with a thinned out Elmer’s glue.  Once the technology advanced he began to scan the sketch and have it printed on the canvas so that he didn’t have to painstakingly recreate it again.  He then painted in acrylics, his paint of choice.  Then we went back over the painting with colored oil pencils for fine line work and oil paint to bring out the luminous quality of the lights in the windows, sky and street lamps.  He’d go over the light sources again with an air brush to give that halo glow around the light sources for the final effect, which he called “turning on the light.”

Kinkade died unexpectedly at the age of 54 on April 4th, 2012.  His paintings are widely known, though none of them hang in the great museums.  However, like Van Gogh and Matisse and so many others, I’m sure the day will come when one of those Placerville Main Street paintings hangs in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Why not?   After all, the great artists of the past have been merchandised aplenty––just take a tour of the MET’s gift shop to find all the mugs, posters, calendars, magnets and such that are made from the great works of art.  The difference is that those old artists never had the chance to participate in the profits and Kinkade did.  Then there is also the fact, for the people of Placerville at least, that their own son, Thomas Kinkade, thought to idealize Placerville so lovingly in his paintings.

Main Street, Placerville, 1916.  By Thomas Kinkade.