NEWS PROFILE: Faith, family inspire popular `painter of light’

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Like a modern American Renoir, Thomas Kinkade is a”painter of light”whose cozy, flower-laced cottages invite onlookers to crawl inside their warmly lit windows for a romantic evening before the radiant hearths imagined within. Images of Kinkade’s idyllic Victorian villages and inspirational landscapes”account for more sales than any other […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Like a modern American Renoir, Thomas Kinkade is a”painter of light”whose cozy, flower-laced cottages invite onlookers to crawl inside their warmly lit windows for a romantic evening before the radiant hearths imagined within.

Images of Kinkade’s idyllic Victorian villages and inspirational landscapes”account for more sales than any other living artist,”he says matter-of-factly. And if past sales are any indication, this year one in 20 Americans will purchase a Kinkade lithograph, poster, collector’s plate, calendar, book, figurine or greeting card.


But it’s not sales that drive him.”God speaks to people through these paintings,”Kinkade said during a recent telephone interview from his studio in the northern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains outside San Jose, Calif., as he worked on his latest canvas,”The Mountain Chapel,”which he described as a”vast mountain landscape with the glory of God pouring through the clouds and a little chapel by the lake.” Kinkade, 40, likens his work to a captivating love song.”At some point, the singer fades into the background and the voice you are hearing is God’s whisper of love. That’s how I feel about my paintings.” Indeed, his art’s underlying message must always override the work itself, said Kinkade, a devout Christian who signs each work with the fish symbol and a Bible reference.”There’s a lot of interest in the paintings I do and the message I bring,”he said.”Simplicity, tranquillity and family are the foundations for living. My paintings illustrate these broader concepts.”Someone can see a little country church and be reminded that faith is a foundation for living. A cottage reminds of family and home.” Terry Sullivan, associate editor of American Artist magazine in New York, credits Kinkade’s vast appeal to the artist’s choice of subjects.”Kinkade works on themes that are generally very popular, the same way that Norman Rockwell worked on popular themes,”Sullivan said.

Those themes _ faith, family and romance _ are not only expressed on Kinkade’s canvases but seem to be lived out in his life, too.

His studio sits adjacent to the family home, where his wife of 16 years, Nanette, keeps busy as a stay-at-home mom. The couple have four daughters, ranging in age from 9 years old to 6 months.

With added tenderness in his already-congenial voice, the loquacious artist refers to Nanette as his childhood sweetheart _ they met when he was 13 and she was 12 _ and best friend. She and the girls frequent his studio throughout the day, he said, with Nanette perhaps offering advice on the latest work _ she’s”one of the few I let into the creative process”_ and the girls taking advantage of the miniature easel set up alongside dad.

As a tribute to Nanette, the letter N appears somewhere in each of Kinkade’s works _ perhaps encased in a red heart on a cottage door or hidden within the brush strokes of a rugged chimney.

However, Kinkade’s family life was not always so story-book like.

His parents divorced when he was 5. Kinkade credits the Church of the Nazarene in his boyhood home of Placerville, Calif., and the strong faith of his mother with getting the fragmented family”through the single-mom experience raising three kids.” And like many teens who grow-up in Christian homes, Kinkade rebelled. By age 20, he said, he found himself at”a point of utter crisis,”an impoverished artist,”confused,”and”without a foundation.” Looking for direction, Kinkade said he began reading the Bible and attending Calvary Chapels, a group of loosely affiliated churches born out of the Jesus Movement that originated in Southern California and swept through other parts of the country during the ’70s. It was then, he said, he learned how to have”a personal relationship with God.” That relationship changed his thinking about art.”I began to see my art as something not to serve myself but to serve others,”said Kinkade, adding that his new-found faith represented a radical departure from the philosophy of art he was exposed to while attending the University of California, Berkeley, where all that seemed to matter was self-expression.”My art is not about me. It is about you … another person who would care enough to take part of their day and enter the worlds I have created,”said Kinkade, known by his admirers as the”painter of light”because of his use of bright colors and impressionistic technique.

To be sure, keeping his art available to the general population is so critical to Kinkade that about two years ago he stopped selling original canvases, which are now”archived for the public interest.”He plans to establish a non-profit foundation to support a museum to house his work.”I got so frustrated with the greed of some art dealers and collectors,”he said.”It introduces an exclusionistic or elitist approach to these paintings.”As an example, Kinkade said paintings he sold in the mid-1980s for $175 each could now fetch”five digits, if not six.” Sandra Carpenter, editor of The Artist’s Magazine in Cincinnati, said she has”no doubt”Kinkade’s originals could command such steep prices.”He’s a marketing phenomenon in the art world,”she said.


In fact, Kinkade’s work is so popular, his Media Arts Group, Inc., shines as a rare example of a company based on the work of an artist that has gone public. Its stock is traded on the NASDAQ exchange, and the company earned about $80 million last fiscal year, Kinkade said.

His lithographs are sold by more than 3,000 independent dealers and in some 100 Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, which are furnished like homes, with romantic fireplaces and over-stuffed chairs.”We wanted to create a non-threatening environment … a place of peace, a place of joy,”Kinkade said of his galleries, which he described as”points of light”in the community.

Spreading joy _ and his faith _ through art is paramount for Kinkade.

When a work is ready for reproduction, he said, his family and a small circle of friends gather for a short prayer ceremony to”ask the Lord to bless the painting, that God would bring his light, his joy”into the homes in which the works will eventually reside.”I pray to God to help people not to see the `painter of light,’ but help them to see the light of the world,”he said.

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