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.