The Mansion Series

"In my new Mansions in Paradise series series, I try to create mansions truly worthy of a paradise, whether earthly or heavenly. At once majestic, comfortable yet human in scale, Lakeside Manor, first in my new series, nestles along the shore of a cobalt blue lake. The gardens are lavish with flowers; radiant sunsets last for hours. This grand mansion is complete with cozy nooks where you might comfortably settle in for a warming cup of tea. A weathered old stone bridge invites visitors to stroll the verdant grounds, while the brook at the left provides a tranquil background murmur sure to make the spirit soar

-Thomas Kinkade"

Thomas Kinkade not only paints inferno-engined cottages that are burning with the fires of hell within tranquil purple and maroon forests, he does the same goddamned thing with larger structures too: dwellings more suitable to the tastes of the
upper-echelon demons of Perdition to live in, not just the tossed-off mini masonry elf houses for the drones and worker-soldiers of Lucifer. Welcome to Lakeside manor. Notice the "lake." It's two feet across. What would Kinkade consider to be a pond: something wiggling in a petri dish? He describes it as a cobalt blue lake, even though to me it looks a more sewagey grey brown ash mud amalgamy stagnant asphalt-methane tar pit color. But, yeah, I would say "cobalt blue" would also describe it. If I was a 99 year old delusional great grandmother two days away from eternity at the hands of a pillow-plunging male nurse in the home. As with the cottages, the back-end of the mansion picture, and most of the stone structured paintings, have a peculiar whitish haze of light emanating from some mysterious source behind the blue trees or on the other side of the violet hedges, as if it is overcast over on that side of the forest or if a supernatural ice storm has erupted amid the tranquil Spring evening. Or morning. Or whatever time of day is supposed to be occurring, which is impossible to tell in a Kinkade painting because the "light" that he paints, being the "painter of light" that he fucking is, this light has no visible source other than some monochrome illumination much as one might find in a Daffy Duck cartoon, but without the entertainment value. A vague silver sheen penetrates the backside of the Kinkade Woods like an oncoming radiation cloud of phophorous isotopes. Or is it receeding? Has it already passed through? That would explain the inexplicable colors of the Kinkadian Life Forms: the blue trees: the brown leaves: the lime treetrunks: the pink bushes: the maroon hedgerows: the orange lawns: the yellow cows: the lavender ducks: the silver streams. I SUPPOSE, in the Kinkade Religion, this Spackle-hued emanance is supposed to be the light of some diety or force or vapid atmospheric confluence of barometric oddities designed to put one in mind of "the eventual rightness of things," so that 90 year old women whose vaginas are dragging on the ground behind their wheelchairs can take some comfort in the delusion that they are not really about to go out of existence for eternity. Hey, Tom, whatever works, I'm good with it, bro!