"Silver and Gold is the first still life I've ever shared with my collectors. This exquisite assemblage of golden blooms in an elegant silver vase gives me the sense of exuberant repose that I get from my most satisfying landscapes. In fact, I treat this still life as a landscape in miniature.
— Thomas Kinkade"
Thomas Kinkade not only does horrible paintings of gazebos and elf houses and lifeless backdrops to Punch and Judy theaters, he also does horrific still lifes. This is the first one he has ever "shared with his collectors." I guess by this he means he foots part of the bill. Or maybe he means he gives the lithos away. Or maybe he means this is the first time anyone outside of his relentlessly mentioned Nanette and his four housedog-named daughters has seen one. I can only speculate the horrors contained in the ones still hidden from view if this is the first one to ever be allowed outside. I do not think anyone with even a fifth grader's familiarity with Actual Art would deny that this is probably one of the worst still life paintings ever created. It takes worthless to its most perfect realization. Using the original of this image as an elevated platform to keep your laptop provided with an underneath airflow would be putting this painting to a better use than looking at it. It has absolutely NOTHING to offer anyone who gazes upon it other than a moment's meaningless relief from a cursory scan of the wall surrounding it. It would be worthy of a Motel 6 diversion from the desolation of the room itself. It would be good to make a Motel 6 room look better. However a cat nailed inside out to the wall of a Motel 6 would also serve the same function. I am going to have to assume that that tilted, warped, oddly built vase on the right is the "silver" part of this painting - which looks like it's made of wood: a wooden vase; which is what it looks like; a vase made out of whitewashed fencing material - I am assuming that is the "silver" portion referred to in the well-thought-out title. And the "gold" must be those yellow carnations behind it that look like exploded baby chicks that just took a gander at the painting Kinkade had put them in and just blew up. Are these items ON anything? Well, maybe they're on the floor. This is the first still life that the Master has deigned to allow outside and perhaps he has not seen the more or less traditional practice inherent in the still life painting
unofficial rulebook that you have an identifiable platform for the objects to be on. The reason for this I will conjecture since I am not an art historian: I would conjecture that the reason the table is always included is to demonstrate that the artist is indeed versatile-enough a craftsman to contrast the "lifeless," constructed-by-man, artifact, with the living artifact constructed by God: a Being who Kinkade never tires of telling us is a frequent visitor to his home. The attempt therefore is to
imbue each element, the man made and the God made, with their appropriate resonances. It is also often a sheer demonstration of virtuosity, into which one need not usually search for meaning or mystery or enigma or mannered effect - though these things can be present, it really makes no difference. But they are not supposed to look like "stuff on the floor," which is what this lazily-painted heap of items basically is. Now, if Kinkade knew who Cezanne was, which is unlikely, he would say "His still lifes are a lot worse than mine." But Cezanne's still lifes aren't really still lifes. They are intrusions into a new dimension of art history. A place Kinkade will never be visiting. Cezanne painted "weight." He painted "gravity." He painted
"the solidity of even an orange or a petal." He was breaking new ground. Kinkade breaks no more than wind from his ass when he paints.This still life is SO bad it is actually difficult to lampoon it. It is just a very ordinary, badly rendered, painting of some flowers and a vase. And what is the "fruit" in the foreground? You tell me. It is completely unidentifiable. One of the virtuoso things painters of loose fruit pride themselves on is displaying via technique and the mush called "paint" - succulence and deliciousness, often. It's like an exciting game they play for themselves. A grape that sings with grapeness in the room. A lemon that makes your cheek glands drain saliva because the sourness fills your mind.
This drab empty flat lifeless spiritless slapdash warm-up, as still lifes go, especially from a painter making millions of dollars a year, is an abomination. He is going to share this with his collectors. His collectors must be insensitive, punishment-loving psychos with no work ethic if they don't whack him with a folded-up newspaper and sent him back to the easel after this insult. Does he even LOOK at the paintings he describes?? The golden blooms in an elegant silver vase? They're in a brown smudge pot in the back. Is that a silver vase? Isn't that lumber-construction with a lid on it supposed to be glass? What the fuck is he describing? A different painting? People say I am picking on the guy. Well, is there some other option?? I mean, at this point I'll listen to anything, my fucking head is spinning. And what does he mean he treats this painting as a landscape in miniature. Why does that make it so. It is not a landscape in miniature, no mater how you treat it, Thom. It's a bad still life. It's not a landscape. Nothing holds to reality with this guy. Reality is whatever thomas Kinkade says it is. He's like Obama: you're not supposed to disagree with the guy no matter how bizarre his utterances about creation. I guess what I am supposed to do, reading this, is say "Well, that's how I will treat it too, then! It's a landscape in miniature!" And what if I did say that? Why would it matter? There would then be two people, not one, making weird pronouncements. Kinkade's world is like Bizarro Land. That would certainly explain the painting style.
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