Art for Everybody (2023)

This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival.


I never really gave much credence to the work of the late artist Thomas Kinkade.  Perhaps because of the volume of his work, I’ve always thought of him more as a brand name than an individual artist.  This, in spite of his raging popularity in the 21^st century.  His paintings, which are mostly made up of soft cozy cottages usually nestled in blankets of snow with light blearing out of every window (giving him the nickname “Painter of Light”) just didn’t resonate with me.  He was the guy whose work was beloved by grandmas everywhere further bolstered by the outward family life and Christian values that he presented to the public.  He didn’t look much like an artist.  In person, he looked more like a retired linebacker.

My perceptions of Kinkade going into Miranda Yousef’s documentary Art for Everybody were only surface-level.  His work was, to me, kind of superficial, but exiting the film, I had a much deeper respect for the man as a tortured artist, a man with a darker side that the public never saw.  He was complicated, we learn, a difficult youth who grew into an artist with two sides; on the one hand the smiling, friendly painter of cottages and gardens; on the other, a darker expressionist painter who hid his true art from the public.  This surfaced later when the overwhelming demands of his backers, criticism of his work and the oversaturation of his output were driving his alcohol addiction, leading to his early death in 2012 at the age of 54.

The value of Yousef’s film is to now look harder into the content of his work in the wake of his death and the revelation about his inner turmoil.  The challenge in his work was looking beyond the façade, beyond the coziness to a much deeper understanding of what was there.  A fellow artist notes that his world on canvas was a total fantasy, a world devoid of crime, of social problems.  It was free of racial diversity – his subjects were all white; and issued a closed-in world that was entirely heteronormative.

What were his paintings trying to say?  If offering the kinds of worlds free of social issues or diversity, they were selling his middle-America audience a promise of a world seen in 60s sitcoms – he could have been painting the streets of Mayberry.  And from that, they flew off the shelves and made Kinkade a millionaire.  He turned his work into a marketing juggernaut that included not only the paintings but coffee mugs, mouse pads, figurines, throw rugs, pillows, furniture, music boxes, pillows, collector plates, you name it.  If you weren’t in the loop, a person who frequented his mall galleries and lined up to spend your retirement money on his work (as one woman confesses to him) then you probably gave it no mind.

But was he pandering?  Was he playing into the hands of those outside the elitist art circles, selling fantasies of pretty gardens, happy taverns, beautiful churches and unchallenging Christian imagery devoid of any real theory or idea?  What the film reveals is that Kinkade had a mastery of marketing himself as well as his art.  He sold to those who were willing to shell out money they probably didn’t have at the expense of his own artistic soul.  Yet, what Yousef tries to do is understand the person behind that façade.  Did he sell his soul?  Did he give up his artistic eye for the comforts of success, selling to those for whom art is generally a mystery?

In a way, yes, but in a way, it also bolstered his image.  Kinkade was eviscerated by art critics for creating images that were pretty but devoid of any serious ideas.  This was good for marketing because, in the minds of his fans, it separated him from the snooty art circles and brought his image down-to-earth.  This was a magic trick of Kinkade.  He sold images of comfort and joy that hid the darker corners of his own soul – addiction and an apparent hair-trigger temper.  In vaults in his home, not opened until after his death, we see the real art of his soul, darker expressionist work that could have pulled him more into the artistic circles.  Art for Everybody is a film that asks us to consider its title.