Let's just jump right to the maestro's words first thing, shall we?
"The Good Shepherd's Cottage is an allegory in paint, an image of the Lord returning to call His faithful. His house is an utterly comfortable and secure cottage, radiant with light. The air is luminous with sunset; the sound of His voice thrilling as He calls His sheep into a verdant meadow.
- Thomas Kinkade"
How the fuck does Kinkade hear the sound of a painted man's voice?? What the fuck is the fucking DEAL with this guy???? Actually I know what the fucking deal is with this guy. He is not selling paintings. He is selling Christianity - or some weird version of it - to people who already have his weird version of Christianity. He is selling cult booster-shots. Christians are convinced they are "nicer" than everyone else, even though in God's eyes all of humanity is fucked up to the max and worthy of destruction. If Jesus is calling the sheep into a verdant meadow he is failing at it, they seem to be making a beeline for the house. Since this is an ALLEGORY IN PAINT the sheep are also us, so we would not be expected to go into the verdant meadow at night, we would go there during the day to have a picnic and go into the "utterly comfortable and secure cottage" at night. So this is more properly not just an allegory but a jumbled allegory. Exactitude is not a trait of Thomas Kinkade in his descriptions of his own paintings, everything is more or less all over the place and peppered with tried and true adjectives. Verdant meadows. Riots of color. Babbling brooks. And I do not personally feel that he is even all that properly aquainted with the nature of Christianity. I always sense that he is walking into the banquet room and sitting at the head of the table unasked.
Even using exhausted cliche'd expressions he falls short of hauling his dreary realities of paint out of their torpor. You cannot fault Mr. Kinkade for bravery or nerve or whatever you want to call it, however, he is quite as prepared and anxious to show you how bad a WRITER he is as he is prepared and anxious to show you how bad a PAINTER he is. So he is consistent. Kinkade, for all his piety and expertise in the Gospels, does not have a clear picture of the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd goes CHASING AFTER the sheep to CARRY THEM BACK ON HIS SHOULDERS. He doesn't stand in the insufferable heat of a burning thatch-roofed cottage in fairyland and beckon them with wizardry and runic utterances and outstreched magnetic arms to come inside and relax. But enough about Jesus, let's get back to the real god here, Thomas Kinkade: that same exact sky appears in damn near every single one of his cottage paintings that HAVE a sky. It's always THAT one. The atmosphere never changes on the Kinkade Horizon. It always results in orange clouds in a yellow sky at sunset. In this painting even Jesus with His super powers cannot seem to dissipate by decree the ominous silver cloud of visible ptomaine that inches closer, ever closer, to THE ALLEGORY IN PAINT. The "utterly comfortable and secure" cottage, does not appear utterly comfortable and secure upon actual close inspection. MOST of Kinkade's utterances seem to undergo noticeable alteration upon actual close inspection. The roof of a portion of the cottage seems to have a clearly defined swayback appearance and does not look all that secure, and the comfort level of a tiny interior glowing with a radiating heat of 2,000 degrees from a mysterious power source that appears to come from the earth's molten core can NOT be comfortable to anyone but Hephaestus, the blacksmith in Zeus's stables; as soon as those sheep enter the house they are going to be vaporized into lanolin mist. In the ALLEGORY IN PAINT the Lord has "returned," most likely to earth, and yet He is in His "house" - most likely in heaven. It's all just a blithering mess. Just say anything at all, "Thom," the pictures will still sell. And, whatdafuck, so far that's been the case.
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