The Painter of the Right

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings “typically feature a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel,” Joan Didion once wrote. “Every window lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.” A recent social-media post from the Department of Homeland Security shared Kinkade’s “Morning Pledge” alongside the words “Protect the Homeland”—a pairing that prompted Sarah Jones to stare into the light and consider the trap. “Kinkade’s work is inescapably ideological.,” she writes. “The point of a Kinkade painting is to comfort, and to quell any uncertainty, which makes it art for strongmen and the crowds they attract.”

Kinkade’s most famous subject was the humble cottage, lit from within by unsettling candlelight. Former Evangelicals may also recall the Bridge of Hope, which spans a creek and heads nowhere. A white dogwood tree stands nearby, a “symbol of the purity of God’s grace,” according to the Kinkade company’s website. Kinkade created a world that some people, maybe even millions of people, wanted to inhabit. Though he was a Christian and his work often contained religious imagery, his art did not proselytize so much as it advertised an alternative reality where proselytization was no longer necessary. In Kinkade-land, everything is serene. There is cohesion. Grandmothers love his pink skies and cobblestone paths. Even today I can close my eyes and imagine a Kinkade abode, squatting underneath some eldritch sunset. A Kinkade landscape is often lifeless. There are few human beings, and fewer complications. Sometimes Jesus appears; other times he is more of a suggestion. Sometimes the paintings light up, literally, as if the artist wanted to burn holes in our retinas.