A Riot of Sludge

I came upon a scene in Ireland where ancient footpaths wind their way over an old stone bridge to a distant village. It was all so green that I began to add brightly colored flowers... and suddenly a riot of colors took over.

— Thomas Kinkade

I have included the powerful words of Thomas Kinkade here in order to show the liklihood of any utterance to be believed simply because it was uttered. You probably actually believe the above utterance of Thomas Kinkade simply because he said it. Why would he lie? So you believe it. You accept it. I on the other hand accept no part of it. I think it is just something he said. There are no brightly colored flowers in this....scene, or whatever it is. Even though he says they are there. Look for yourself. Do you see any brightly colored flowers? Or do you see a sort of gray ashen lifeless watery pastey film of blots that are a sort of lazyass crapload of flower shapes indifferently colored. There is no "riot of colors" TAKING OVER. There is nothing being TAKEN OVER in this painting except you. You are being taken over a garden path of nonsense and bad writing. The expression "riot of colors" is the one used by people whose brains are in a state of frozen hybernation. The only thing ACTUALLY present in this painting is the usual Thomas Kinkade wad of crap with a new introduction of listless, unimaginative banter, is all. He should have just said "and suddenly a wad of crap took over." Not a "riot of color." A wad of crap. "Me and my bottle and my stomach were walking along and suddenly a wad of crap took over." And yet he tells you something else. And he says it with so much casual assurance that he could tell you you had a ten inch dick and you would believe that too. "I came across this little scene in Ireland and saw that you have a ten inch dick and that is what inspired me to install a wad of crap onto a scene that i came across and then changed into another scene altogether. Oh, and you're wife is hotter than Paris Hilton too." Why, one might ask, is he telling us this. Even if it's true, it's stupid: he came across a scene and painted it differently from what it was? And we need to know this? Just paint the fucking scene, asshole. And why is the "distant village" only ten feet away? And, in fact, nothing is distant in Ireland. Everything in Ireland is pretty close by. The only thing actually "distant" in Ireland is Australia. In Ireland, Australia is distant. And why is he mentioning Ireland even at all when this - whateveritis - is so unIreland-like that the Irish chamber of commerce ought to be looking into their legal binders to see if they can arrest him on some charge relating to slandering an island. WHO THE FUCK BUYS THESE SHITTY PICTURES???? "...suddenly a riot of colors took over." Or a riot of LSD kicked in. LSD, you should ask for a refund on Thom  cause he sure ain't doing you justice with his experience of you. Not if you're inspiring shit like this out of him.

The Tree of Blood

   This thing is called The Good Life. It's the typical dollhouse mentality landscape of Senyore Kinkade, containing as it does a toy structure and a caustic stream and the usual tableau of strontium-90-in-the-air kind of pallor to be interpreted by the senile as paradise. The lobster red tree near the house is particularly disturbing in a painting of Thomas Kinkade's -  which are usually overrun with disturbing aspects - but this tree in particular seems especially craven. It is like a gigantic lung. It's got the capillary system of an xray hanging on a clip. It violates every known law of terrestrial life. It is like Creationism as bolstered and reinforced by the flailing compulsion known as the Thomas Kinkade Work Ethic: "paint as much crap as you can as fast as you can and as the years go by get worse and worse and worse." He's like a raging machine of sub- par-ability-gone-wild. Joe Francis could make videos of it.
   You would have to be profoundly disturbed to find this painting relaxing. You would have to have your head actually literally and physically up your ass to see any merit or virtue in this from a customer's point of view.
   The two fires inside the house aren't enough, the guy in the front yard -  who appears to be taking a wizz - actually has a third fire smoldering in the grass. Maybe he is going to burn the whole panorama down.
   The canoe could be used as a bridge over that fucking mercury stream, where the fuck is he going to sail it, down that piss trail in the yard? There isn't enough water in that rivulet to float the corpse of a goldfish much less a heavy canoe with a man in it.
   Bill and Hillary Clinton like this man's work. I just threw that in 'cause it came to mind. Bill and Hillary Clinton are supposed to be the two most astute human beings ever produced from American sperm and eggs. You should be frightened by that last sentence even more than your fright experienced from the painting itself.
   The ramifications of Thomas Kinkade's sales volume are, to anyone with a shred of intelligence or discernment, very unsettling. His entire Darkside psyche gets put on display for all to see, like a cry for help, and people - very odd people - just can't get enough of this dementia and drunken mockery into their living spaces. I suppose it will take 300 yards of yellow crime tape forming a perimeter someday, however, before anyone believes me that he is quietly going off the rails.

Daccau

   This is called Lamplight Inn. It ought to be called Cauldron of Hellfire, since that is what seems to be illuminating the buildings. As inns go this one looks like the last stop before the furnaces of the Holocaust. Jews must look at this and scream aloud in the sudden horror of racial memory. Made of dead brick and the blasting lava lakes of perdition, this painting has about as much human soul in it as a rock quarry used for executing infants in front of their mothers. A pervasive bright, dead light infects the whole of the sunlit hell, like incinerating pancake batter; a Bisquik whitewash of infected yellow talc at 900 degrees Farenheit, this is the Inn of Death, the Overnight of Eternal Damnation, this is the Stumble Inn And Die, a stomach eruption in brick and grass and digestive fluids turned to paint. One of the buildings doesnt even look like it's a complete building. It looks like a movie facade where actors go in and emerge immediately back into the outside air, out of camera range.
   The slime running under the bridge seems to be accruing in center stream, like infectious algae, so I don't know what the boats parked at the muddy, stench-strong shoreline float upon to get to some area outside the picture, the river looks like you could walk across it it is so blanketed with slimy plant matter. The whole atmosphere looks like there was an explosion in the nearby mustard-gas factory, the air looks unbreathable, you begin to gasp for breath as soon as your eyes focus and adjust from the blinding meaningless light pouring from all the windows of the buildings where the village psychos gather to kill and eat.
   The lamps in the Lamplight Inn must be fueled by the engines of Tartarus and the kilns of Vulcan. Inside the buildings, Darth Vader and Obi Wan are battling one-on-one amidst the flying lava eruptions and lakes of red and flowing melted granite. You want to put a handkerchief over your mouth and run, run for your life out of the area, to be free from the yellow smoke and mystery haze of lung-eroding death that fills the air and sky and causes the backround area to become invisible in the Chernobyl miasma of atmospheric gauze.

Portofino For The Blind

This is Portofino. I guess it's in Italy. It looks like someone threw up on the canvas. There is a sailing vessel off to the right that is almost as big as the town. It all looks like it was painted in three minutes with the brush in his teeth. It is Plein Air. It says so in the stamped circle. Unfortunately this stamped circle will not appear on the print. It's the best thing in that painting and it is a shame that it is omitted in the version that will hang in your ugly living room as it lives out its life nauseating your imbecilic guests, which will be the kind of guests you will likely have as friends if you purchased a copy of this shitty thing. You clearly are an idiot. And most likely so are all your friends.
   The painting looks like dried eggs. It looks like something hardened onto the breakfast plate.
    One of the masts of the gigantic boat rises about ten stories. Why it doesn't have shipping containers on it I don't know, it is big enough to haul the daily child labor output of Pakistan in one trip. The scene is not even two dimensional, it is by some magic almost non dimensional. It is almost a negation of even the reality of its own canvas. Laid next to a specimen of roadkill still in the road your eye would wander to the carcass in admiration of its beauty. I wonder what it sells for. I'll take two please.

The Grand Canyon For Toy Cars

This is the Grand Canyon as depicted by Thomas Kinkaid for his "plein air" series. Plein air means basically pictures of California done by artists in the 20's to the fifties. It is a style of art-department classification. It is a sort of "age" and style of art. It has been appropriated by, now, all bad painters who paint "things that are outside. Thomas Kinkade is not a plein air painter. He is a cartoonist for nursery-wall decor. This  probably the worst painting of the Grand Canyon ever done - this painting of the Grand Canyon is not plein air in any extended definition of the term imaginable. I have never seen the Grand Canyon painted by anyone in a monotone of hanging-moss green. I have never seen the Grand Canyon so badly rendered that it looks like a rocky culvert constructed by a copper company to shunt toxic effluvium from the furnaces into the landscape and turning it into a biohazard wasteland. I have never seen the Grand Canyon rendered to the dimensions of a moto-cross impediment solved by a speedy approach and a jump to the other side.
   Paintings of the Grand Canyon by able southwest painters number in the thousands, most of them almost, if not completely, thrilling in their magic in recreating the fantastic reality of this mighty and awe-provoking vista. This mess here, however, is almost a satire, as if the assignment was "depict the Grand Canyon in such a way that it inspires derision for the State of Arizona." It is a debauchery of the Grand Canyon. It approaches the essence of the meaning of the word vile. It looks like an abandoned sewage channel. Nature is turned almost demonic in its errors: there have never been vast accumulations of after-storm mists hanging in an arroyo that measures ten feet across as exist in this chunky drywash location. A rill on the moon has more life and charm than does this abortion of pond life with the placenta still attached and flopping around. Hitler painted better than this. You start to cough and choke as you gaze into the foetid, supposedly distant, eroded monuments that here appear to be within the leaping distance of a double leg-amputee. The scene is sulphuric. The closer Kinkade gets to Jesus the more hellish his art becomes. It makes you wonder if he found the right guy. There is one more glaring anomaly in this scene of the Grand Canyon; the far side - which is ten miles away in reality - appears here to be higher than the near side. No one in the history of art has ever been so stupid as to do this. This is a painting painted by a drunk who simply doesn't give a shit. This is a guy on a personal mission of fun to see how shitty he can paint a picture and still sell it to morons at a premium price.

Nature's Caustic Landscape

   I have not critiqued a Thomas Kinkade mess in a while and it turns out this blog actually has acquired a reader besides me and so I guess it is time for me to update things a bit so that my readership does not get bogged down in rereads. Fortunately in the year or so since I have done anything here Thomas Kinkade has not improved. As you can see by today's selection Nature's Paradise.
   As is my custom when looking at a Thomas Kinkade picture for the first time I try to find the violations of the laws of Nature, an occurrence Thomas Kinkade is an adept at rendering.
    Let us overlook the proliferation of the wildlife petting zoo hanging around the cabin lit like the core of Vesuvius in full fury even though there is a listless almost doll like human in the canoe three feet offshore. Thomas Kinkade being Thomas Kinkade this is very likely the wooded retreat of Jesus of Nazareth and so we would expect the critters of Nature to be calm and at ease. That might even be the Jayster Himself out there in the canoe.
  Off in the distance we see a cataract of water entering the lake at a far higher rate than it is leaving the lake in the foreground. There is also a gushing froth of the trademark platinum ichor that is Thomas Kinkade Liquid entering the front pond without disturbing the surface of the water to any extent, and neither are the whatevertheyare swimming on the surface making any kind of ripple.
   There is an unused canoe in the yard in case you did not get the full campground thrill of the scene from the canoe off in the distance.
   The pine trees starting to grow in the foreground must have been planted there by the cabin owner himself because the rest of the forest is filled with trees from a lower elevation.
    Since wild turkeys do not inhabit forests of firs in the western United States, which is where this must likely be judging from the terrain, the owner of the cabin must have that one as a personal pet brought with him from Connecticut.
   On the other side of the lake there appears to be a pine forest but this must be a mistake on my part because the abrupt hill rising to the left seems to be covered with scrub from a much lower elevation.
     The scene is lit, as are all scenes in a thomas Kinkade artwork, in a universal equi-intense cartoon-like uniformity. There is no reality here, there is only playpen fun, geared to the undiscerning eye of an infant on pablum, where everything is a single comicbook intensity of light and shadowlessness. This is a wildlife scene geared to the mind of a person who has never left the home for the elderly, who was born there, lived out their life there, and died there, and was carted off to the dogfood plant for rendering into something actually usefull. When his scenes become a series of stamps from the Post Office we will then know that the Wrath of God is not far off in coming.