These images can be found at http://thomaskinkade.com/
I honestly have a thing for artists that critics hate and common folk like my parents and grandparents loved. Norman Rockwell is a bit like that. He enjoyed commercial success as a magazine illustrator. That is about as far from avant garde art as you can get. But what can I say? I don’t call myself an artist. I am a cartoonist and all around goofball. I don’t do serious art. So the questions surrounding Thomas Kinkade bounce off my tough old non-critical hide like bullets off the orphan of Krypton. I love his pictures for their gaudy splashes of color, his way with depicting puddles and water of all sorts (splashes of splashes), and his rustic homes and landscapes of another era. This is a man who does lovely calendar art and jigsaw puzzle art. He is roundly criticized for factory production of “original” oil paintings which are actually a base he created and made a print of painted over by an “assistant” artist or apprentice. But I don’t care . I like it. And you used to be able to see his originals without going to museums, in art stores at the shopping mall. He is unfortunately dead now. For most great artists, that makes their work more valuable and more precious. Kinkade’s art hangs in so many homes around the country already that his fame has probably already reached its peak. Look at these works that he did for Hallmark and Disney and various other mass-market retail outlets. I dare you not to like it.
Catch a Falling Star 
I have always been a bit embarassed by the fact that I like Thomas Kinkade. I love the overly colorized, bordering on garish scenes. I just do. They make me want to step inside and have a look around. I bet the animals would surround me and I’d sing to them like a Disney princess. How can that be bad?
I applaud your coming to terms with the same kind of love for kitschy homely art that I have. I call it homely art because it has a bad reputation, but it hangs in my parents’ home to this very day.
Homely is a sweet double entendre.
I loved his work when I saw it in malls as a girl. It takes talent to create such beautiful scenes. Who cares what anyone else says? Thanks for sharing!
It’s one of those controversies where I kinda enjoy being on the wrong side of the argument. I really don’t think shortcuts in art are cheating at all. It is just another technique for producing results. There are probably more Kinkades on display in homes than than any other painter’s work on Earth.. That is a result to be admired.
I always loved Thomas Kincaid. I once had many of his art. I just saw a movie on Hallmark about him. I thought his work was only with the Bradford Exchange.
You can find a whole gallery of his work in the Bradford Exchange, but you used to find Kinkades in all sorts of art stores, though I’m sure some of those, if not all of those, were resales. I think they have increased in value since his death. The new art, though, is actually painted by his assistants and is far cheaper. Low prices for fine art is the main factor that made him famous.
Oh dear…I actually own some of Kinkade’s paintings and am a HUGE Norman Rockwell fan! What can I say? I spend alot of time in Kinkade’s Galleries on the Peninsula. His work “centers me”……
I love to look at the originals even more than a print. There is no way a reproduction can capture the beautiful interplay of light and color that Kinkade or even Rockwell can… although I’ve only ever seen one original Norman Rockwell in the National Art Museum in Washington D.C.
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Here’s a unique American original artist who has profoundly affected the home environment of millions. He’s worth a second look.