The Robert Girrard Years

" Gazing takes us to just such an exquisite French vista as inspired the original Impressionists. A lithe, graceful young lady, dressed in white and wearing a bonnet, gazes out across a glittering lake toward a distant village. She stands under a single, slender tree, entirely absorbed in the scene that captures her gaze. The mood is one of breathless anticipation. It is not only the girl who holds her breath in order to enter into the perfect tranquility of the moment; it is us as well. As she gazes at far horizons, we, in turn, gaze at her, hoping to join in her beautiful world.

-Thomas Kinkade"

Astounding even to me Thomas Kinkade once used a "brush name," as he calls it. I have never known of a painter to do this. This is weird even by Kinkade standards and he more or less has a lock on the aberration. This actually-endurable painting is called "Gazing." Mr. Kinkade-Girrard is not a master of titles by any stretch of anyone's imagination including Timothy Leary's.
He also is possessed of, among other things, the habit of telling you what he has painted in words that are not representative of what he ACTUALLY painted. He tends to optimize, in other words. Or in fact exaggerate. Or rather he creates an entirely new work altogether in his blurbs from what he painted on the canvas, later to be offset lithoed hundreds of times at 500 bucks per sheet. An Actual Artist does not tell you what he has painted. He just paints it. You are on your own as to what or why or where he did it, it is not the painter's job to do YOUR job for you. Your job is to respond, or react, or contemplate, or stare, or ignore, or scratch your balls or pick your asshole. The painter's job is to move on to painting a new painting, and, I really hate to say it, more or less tell you to go screw yourself. In fact a lot of them will tell you that right to your face. Thomas Kinkade would never dream of behaving in this manner, even if he really was chomping at the bit to do so. In fact, this horrific monstrosity of the paintbrush does exactly the opposite: he tells you what he wants you to convince yourself that you are looking at, first on the list being A Good Painting. Now, while this particular painting is actually a cut above all the others I have brought to your attention so far, his declarations of its merits are equal in vigor as his declarations regarding the Clearly Putrid ones, like "Bridge of Hope," for example. So in other words, he either has no clue what the fuck he is painting and thinks they are all equally wondrous, or he is lying about either the good ones or he is lying about the bad ones. So he is either an idiot or a liar. I personally think he's a liar. I am pretty sure that he knows he is painting swill for idiot, half-blind 90 year old bath-free-for-20-years old ladies who think Obama is a credit to his race and that real music died with Lawrence Welk. In fact that would be a great name for Thomas Kinkade: the Lawrence Welk of wall-decor.