Re: Thomas Kinkade, Beyond the GArden GAte

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From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 01/05/03-06:24:21 PM Z


Marco wrote:

  But I know I'm not
> looking for escapism; I'm looking for something positive in art, and I
> believe that's what you're feeling.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not looking for escapism all the time, but sometimes. I do feel the
need to escape some aspects of contemporary life, like the traffic, the
noise, the sulfurous smells (or is this just Houston?), and the war
mongering. I wonder if other people also have this desire, and one way to
do it is to sort of lose yourself in a book like the one I got for
Christmas.

But, clearly there is something wrong with Thomas Kinkade's paintings, and
some other people hit on it: it's all about the bottom line and marketing,
although it may have started as something else, something sincere perhaps.
I think it might be ok to make images that are somewhat "escapist," even
images that are not really very real, although that's a bit hard to do with
photography, but somehow Kinkade crosses some sort of line into bad taste.
I'm just not sure where the line is.

A lot of the images that I make around here have beautiful streams, grazing
cattle, dogs, nice trees with moss, and things like that in them. There are
no thatched cottages to be seen, and there is a lot of barbed wire and
plastic buckets laying around also, not to mention the dead appliances in
the creek. But if I lived in the Cotswolds, maybe my photographs would look
a lot like these Kinkade paintings, especially if they were in color. Would
that be bad? It's actually pretty hard to imagine a photograph very much
like these paintings. Maybe photography has enough of reality in it to
prevent it from ever sliding completely over the cliff of Kitsch. Well,
maybe the kitten in the teacup would qualify.

--shannon


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