Friendship Cottage Where Friendships End. In Murder

This is a rare anomaly in the Kinkade portfolio, a painting that almost makes you want to look at it. I think it is the predominance of green within its lifeless, spiritless borders that makes you forget for a moment the previous horrors you were subjected to as you perused the artistically desolate Kinkade ouvre. The ominous silver fog of mystery chemicals is noticeably gone in this picture. That alone would remove 50% of the disturbing menace that engulfs all of his nursery-school wall paintings. There is almost a sliver of breeze whacking against the inescapable strip of smoke coming from the inescapable smoking chimney. It could be this and this alone, this spark of life SOMEWHERE that so drastically alters the mood of the thing from a ghastly scene of post apocalyptic death to one of actual aliveness. It takes so very little to so radically alter a Thomas Kinkade mausoleum tableau into a pleasant party scene. You would think he would put down the bacon sandwich and attempt it more often. This painting is so devoid of the deadly forboding, or sense of doomstruck, neutron bomb aftermath that his paintings all have, that I am tempted to wonder if maybe he didn't do this one at all. Even the cottage is different. It seems to have some aspects of the Third Dimension to it as it aims itself diagonally across the canvas, like a small ship steaming through the glen. And we see the cottage as if from a lower angle than the head-on tank-attack broadside wall-of-treacle that we have gotten so used to. There is almost an atom of drama in its configurational mode. It is almost non sepulcheral in its aspect. The walls seem to bulge from the festive nature of itself, though it is actually most likely the escalating PSI's from the about-to-explode pressure-cooker inferno engaged in a devouring feeding-frenzy of the couches and drapes of the interior of the still-contained conflagration occuring inside. Still, it is almost fun. It is almost pleasant. This HAS to be a painting by someone else. Even the thick monochrome colormass of green coming at you from all directions is actually pleasant. Sure, it has the many Kinkade monstrosities present to offer some counter argument to the suggestion he didn't do it: the idiotic little streetlight or porchlight
stuck in the middle of nothing for no reason: all the lights are on even though it is broad daylight. There are the usual Insane Klown Posse colors on the undergrowth. The lime-green, lifelessly dense hoargrass growing up from the sides of the cement-hard, desicated earthen concrete of the drought-encrusted path that apparently nothing has trod for years. And of course the stream is filled with molten chrome. Sure: many of the traditional Kinkade nightmares are all there. But some have been removed and have been replaced with something very akin to...I almost can't believe I am saying this: nonregurgative viewability. Perhaps a pang of conscience stabbed briefly at his soul during the making of it and he gave-in to its strange and alien allure. I have never seen a second instance of a painting like this from him so I guess the uncharacteristic discomfort passed as quickly as it arrived.