Maybe Panini was just trying to get it right--or maybe he had three offers he couldn't refuse on one painting. (Although, perhaps potential patrons would be offended that he'd painted other versions, so maybe that was a bad idea.)

There's a massive unfinished post about Thomas Kinkade's art in my Movable Type queue. It never escapes onto the front page because I have too much to say on the subject.

Also, I have to admit that the header "Chinese Panini" made me wonder if you had discovered a fusion recipe involving bok choi and flatbread.

But art is tasty, too.

The picture this post is about though... Sheer wonder. It's like if Henry Darger had found the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and copied it.

(Re: Kinkade: In a previous life when I was an art student, family members would tell me that maybe someday I'd be as good as Bob Ross. The idea tempted me to throw myself from a bridge more than any adolescent breakup ever had.)

I'm also glad others don't like Thomas Kinkade. I find his works a bit creepy (forced wholesomness) and he's apparently also really mean to his gallery holders.

I think the reason the imitation Kinkades are better than the originals is that the structures in them don't have the freakish hyperperfection Kinkade is obsessed with.

Also, they look like several 1500-piece puzzles I enjoyed futzing with before I had cats. I feel kinda nostalgic.

And of course just the concept of a faux Kincade is totally charming. Though not enough to pay for.

Oh, that's why da Vinci is a master - he only painted the Madona of the Rocks twice! (although they are not exact copies - there are interesting iconographical differences). ;>

Add my voice to those longing to hear your wisdom on Thomas Kinkade - I have some ideas as to why I don't like his work, but I've never managed to look at it long enought to get really specific. For me, it has a considerably amount to do with what I consider a truly insipid palette, and that lemon-light effect.

Lots and lots of people - including first class people - did this. I've seen a painting that was purported to be a Rubens copy of a lost Michelangelo, with a provenance, if proven, to back it up. I don't know what happened to it - an art history professor I knew was doing some preliminary research on it, which was how I saw it.

Didn't see any prima facie evidence that it wasn't - other than the very unlikelihood of it all. I don't know what happened to it - my guess is that it turned out to be someone else's copy. But that Rubens was copying Michelangelo was not considered to be the unlikely part of the story.

You'll still (especially in the big East Coast museums) see art students copying works, usually in pencil, but sometimes someone will get permission to use oils. I did it myself.

So, you know, if you buy one, make sure you buy a genuine hand-painted fake, and not a crappy fake made by printing a good reproduction on canvas.

I kind of want the wild-jazz-party one, it pains me to say...

Rob @ 6: Because no one will buy the real one if it's still hanging in the Louvre!

Of course, it isn't Leonardo, but it can't be easy, either.

Margaret @ 16: I think my hatred for him really started to burn when I saw America's Pride and Light of Freedom at the same time.

I add my ditto for the Kincade rant. A partial or semi-coherent version would be better than none.

Also, the Something Awful goons' Photoshop Phriday sessions have lit into Kincade on more than one occasion.

* * *

Is it just me, or is there's something vaguely off, perspective-wise, about the Kinclones?

My great aunt lives in Carmel. Kincaid is her neighbor. She does not have a very high opinion of him.

Thomas Kincaid collectables -- music boxes, Christmas villages and the like -- are offered several times a year.

They're uniformly hideous.

I clip the ads out and send them to my sister, an actual working artist.

TV says donuts are high in fat, kazoo
Found a hobo in my room
It's princess Leia, the yodel of life
Give me my sweater back or I'll play the guitar

I kinda liked the person in what I take to be clerical robes who has been transformed into a crabby old woman.

The reclining sheep with its back to the viewer in place of the odalesque is just -- priceless.

The one that's tempting me, though, is "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold".

I've done that, when I was in the Vatican museums.

I was mainly sketching stonework and so-on, especially in the Egyptian section, but I also sketched a Van Gogh in the Modern Religious Art section.

...and recursion of a recursive painting is almost . .. well .. darn.

A (brief overview) for those who'd like the poem also.)

I don't know the original of the painting you don't want on your wall. I'm sure I should. But this one looks overwhelmingly like the Bellowhead after-show party. (Video of Bellowhead may give you a better idea).

Maybe it's a deliberate effect, like in Magritte's L’Empire des lumières?

The only thing that would cause me to not want that Kincaid article up is if you gave me a choice between it and the The Left Hand of Darkness as fanfic article.

Go on, you know you want to post it.

The man (Kinkade) drives me batty. From the nuclear shrubbery to the sappy sentimentalism of his pieces to his shady art sales techniques. Blech, blech, and blech again. It's not just one thing, it's the whole.

The whole Painter of Light title irks me. I mean, what did he think the rest of us were doing? Painters of Ultraviolet and Infrared Spectrums? Painters of Things Not Quite Illuminated? And really, trademarking it? If anyone deserves that title for obsessively painting his subjects in changing light, it's Monet for his Rouen paintings.

Confession time: There is one Kinkade painting I liked as a teen--a picture of turn-of-the-century San Francisco in the rain. It's about the only time his peculiar lighting actually worked for the painting, what with the rainy roads reflecting the light back up.

I, too, thought for a split second that this was going to be a restaurant review. Teresa lives in New York City, where such a thing as "Kosher Chinese Pizza" is available. A grill-pressed General Tso's Chicken does not seem that extreme, in the most multicultural city in the world.

I, too, would like to read Teresa crushing Kinkade. If it's too long, Teresa, you could publish it in parts (a month apart, say).

I find the Chinese painter's take on Laocoön particularly giggleworthy.

Ulrka @ 15: You've reminded me of my experience at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, where I worshipped at the shrine of Vermeer, then thought about buying a print -- and didn't, because it was too easy to look carefully at the prints, go back to the real painting, go back to the prints, and realize that none of the prints got the colors quite right -- and the colors were a key part of what made the paintings work.

A few years ago, I went to The Hague to see Vermeer's View on Delft, which was hanging in a small room opposite the more famous Girl With a Pearl Earring, That was the day that I realized how hopelessly inadequate an art print is. Paint is amazing. Its color, texture, and effect cannot be duplicated easily.

...and, will you look at that: Peter at #39 has beaten me to the Vermeer post. Hello, fellow Dutch museumgoer! I highly recommend a visit to Den Haag!

I have the same reaction to Kinkade's art that I do to Steven Spielberg's movies; I run screaming from the room at the emotional manipulation.

The irony is that the day before my visit to the Rijksmuseum, my friend and I did visit Den Haag -- but we didn't get to the museum! (Either it was closed, or we'd spent so much time in Leiden that by the time we got to Den Haag, there wasn't time left.) But I'll definitely keep it in mind for my next visit.

To continue the copying theme: while we were in Amsterdam, we visited the Van Gogh Museum, which had a special exhibition on Japanese and Chinese art imported to Europe in the late 19th Century. Part of the exhibition featured Van Gogh's copies/interpretations of prints by Hiroshige.

G. Jules @ 41: Good God, those are creepy. Yeesh. I feel all twitchy now.

It has been suggested that the most interesting and dynamic art comes about when different cultures make contact. What we think of as Northwest Coast Indian art really didn't get started until Russian and European traders moved into the area. One of the items the Indians traded for was vermillion pigment; nothing in their environment provided as nice a red.

As a result of this, we have only original art on our walls*. Some of it is factory art from a door to door seller (two abstracts and one figure in oil). Some of it is from lesser professional artists. And some of it is from amateurs, many of them in exchange for bound books.

------
* Except in the kids' room, which has one picture from a card shop. Whaddaya gonna do?

There's nothing gives bad dreams at night
as seeing the detailed, excessively bright,
crimes against taste
produced in great haste
by Kinkade, the painter of shite.

MikeB @ 40 -- I agree with you about the inadequacy of Vermeer prints once you have seen the originals. The strongest experience like that for me was about 15 years ago the one time I have been able to visit the Tate (now apparently Tate Britain). The collection had just been rehung and it was a bit disorienting, between the crowds and the difficulty knowing what was where.

When I studied 20th Century art, I had seen many reproductions of Jackson Pollock paintings (including some very high quality slides, which often are better than prints). I thought I appreciated what was going on, but on the whole preferred Clyfford Still. I walked into one room, and Summertime: Number 9A covered one entire wall. I had studied that painting in some detail through large prints and detail shots, but the real painting hit me like a hammer in the middle of the forehead. The ability to move from a variety of full views of the work to right up close examing detail and color made so much difference. (I love British museums -- you can often get much closer.) I can't say that I "like" Pollock any more, whatever that might mean, but now my respect for him and is work is immense.

And Thomas Kincade can . . . well, I don't plan to be in Carmel any time soon. It's time to release your doo-dahs on him, Teresa.

For instance, the two pictures on the third row. There's a child-hand and an adult head. While the right-hand picture: just look at the alignment of the eye-corners.

Trouble is, when you look furhter on the site, it turns out that these are photographs of children, and products of theb whole child beauty pageant thing. Which is creepy. I still suspect photo re-touching, but these are real kids.

And a very fake image.

http://www.puzzleworld.com/detail.aspx?ID=2837

NelC @38- Kincaid and copyright-

You may be remembering news stories about political art that contained Kincaid parodies. "To critics, the show is anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-capitalism, not to mention obscene, blasphemous and maybe even seditious." Jos Sances' exhibit received plenty of news coverage back in 2002.

This page has two of his Kincaid parodies.

Teresa @4
Please please please please please oh, oh, oh please. Please?

---
* a gallery-and-tourist filled quaint town 2 hours south of San Francisco. Worth a stop in itself as well as for being the northern start/endpoint for the always stunning Big Sur coastal drive.

And it wasn't even the first round of inspiration! The prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige, et al. that van Gogh and other European artists were fascinated by were themselves partly the product of Japanese fascination with European art of the previous centuries (as mentioned, e.g., here or here).

This page on Hokusai notes that copperplate etchings of Dutch landscapes were one of the main sources of inspiration for late-18th and early-19th Century Japanese artists. It goes on to add

By the late 1700s, these Dutch paintings had become so common that the etchings were used as cheap illustrations. Dutch merchants smuggled their goods into Japan. These wares were often wrapped in paper that had been illustrated with these etchings. For Hokusai and other artists, the thrown-away wrappers were more interesting than the imports.

It has been suggested that the most interesting and dynamic art comes about when different cultures make contact....

I'm certainly inclined to agree with you.

I’d like to belive that the wacky translation of the Panini might be the artist asserting his masterly originality at this level.

Thought so.

(Don't kill me, I got over it.)

And in addition to his crimes against aesthetics, the man publically urinated on a statue of Winnie the Pooh!*

I mean, there are limits!

(Well, so the LA Times claims. I wasn't there or anything...)

I don't know what on earth possesses people to photoshop perfectly cute pictures of toddlers into these monstrosities.

Yup. Too horrible for me to look carefully at, but first stop is that the perfectly good eyes (too perfect, photoshopped most likely) simply don't belong in those faces or go with those expressions (such as they are).

* For values of.

Kansas City is apparently enough of a Kinkade market that we have a store in the Country Club Plaza, our most chichi shopping area. Never been in it since the art makes me barf.

About that time, he was sort of finishing up a series of paintings of the beach occupied by lots and lots of little tiny (on the canvas, I mean) people, and in the middle of a phase of painting various arrangements of oranges, clouds, and orange-shaped holes in the clouds.

Kincade, of course, was painting almost exactly the same thing then as he's painting now.

Pixelfish #36: I can't remember where I saw a reference to someone as "painter of light" from the 1960s or so, but it was definitely being used as a title, and it wasn't for Kinkade.

There is something seriously wrong with a system of aesthetica that takes nice enough girls and turns them into grimacing devil-children, and counts it an achievement.

Why not leave the child out of it, and just use Poser models to start with? It'll save on therapy.

Of course, this is one area where getting someone to do a nice sketch or painting from the original'd work. There must be starving young artists out there willing to do something like that, no?

And chalk me up as someone else: a) who finds those photos intensely creepy (the phrase "Uncanny Valley" came to me too) and b) wants to read Teresa's demolition.

And then, as pointed out upthread, there's the shonky just-shy-of-a-pyramid-scheme affiliate sales stuff, the layers of copyists, the politics.

But the scary thing is that people buy this shit. Lots of them. And they buy LOTS of it. Clearly, though it is just about pessimal by any artistic criterion, it's an optimal solution for some group of the population.

I suspect that the distribution of sales is highly leptokurtotic, i.e. opposite of the long tail - and I also suspect that membership of the residual 27 per cent of Bush supporters and multiple Kincade ownership is highly correlated.

In a previous life when I was an art student, family members would tell me that maybe someday I'd be as good as Bob Ross. The idea tempted me to throw myself from a bridge more than any adolescent breakup ever had.

funny, in my art school years, (uh, last year & the two preceding) bob ross was ironically embraced, as a rebellion against those who were training us to be fine artistes on the lofty intellectual vanguard. i saw more than a few che-guevara-fied bob ross t-shirts on campus....

& on the subject of painted copies of paintings: my strongest memory from a day trip down to the tourist trap area of tijuana were the frida kahlo paintings for sale in many shops: they were painted copies, & i could easily believe they were the same scale & media she used (she painted pretty small, & mostly on masonite, mimicking folk art. which is now mimicking her right back). & i'm also sure these were handmade & not giclees or nothing.

i was too weirded out, as a nice western arty kid raised in the cult of authenticity, to buy one. but i think kahlo would have approved.

I mean, I read SF. I'm supposed to be familiar and comfortable with the alien, but I reflect on the minds of the people who would actually want something like that hanging on their wall, and I shudder. Never mind the Universe, it's people that are stranger than we think, and stranger than we can think.

Also, they have this painting of Young Dragaerans At Play. For some reason they give it a different title, but we know better.

The discussion of art reproductions in general led toward a vague idea that it would make an interesting topic for an SF story: a (misguided? insane? profitable?) quest for the perfect copy/virtual image of famous artwork, e.g. "Your own Van Gogh".

here,
here, and here.

Some of them are very subtle - I had to squint to see the hanged man dangling from the front porch of one of the pretty little cottages.

You know the Peter Rabbit themed gift shop downtown?

My great aunt and her daughter ran that. Just shut down after twenty-something years.

#81: "Some of the new high-density neighborhoods, west of Portland, were designed in part by focus group."

Which ones? There's a high-density neighborhood nearby, but there's far too much stucco to look Kinkadish.

Just like the shopping-mall promotion robot builder I met in the 1980s, who had a pristine replica of R2-D2 in his basement, but couldn't bring it out, for fear of copyright violations.

Mind you, most of these are bar stories. Still fun, like what really happened to Dag Hammerskjold (head man in the U.N.) in the 1950s.

Though this anime music video doesn't show more than a few frames of the classic Gainax bounce, that Anna Mae model goes beyond any sane exaggeration.

Law & Order:CI had a ripped-from-the-headlines episode a while back in which their thinly-veiled Kinkade clone transformed from money-grubbing hack to manipulative, murdering scumbag. I freely admit to watching the ep with a wide smile on my face, content in the knowledge that the L&O writers clearly despise Kinkade as much as I do.

Perhaps because it's the place where my dog takes her dumps, I've never seen it as particularly fantastic. Definitely sheltered-upscale, though.

Now, there is something odd about the faux brownstones in the "downtown" area. There's a "dropped from orbit" look and feel to them, and retail establishments are all way upscale.

I do see some encouraging things "downtown:"

Lots of pedestrians.

While walking the dog last summer, I saw a bunch of residents sitting on their stoops talking to passersby. Genuine and charming neighborhood interaction.

And there's a good farmer's market there during the summer.

Inkjet onto plastic injection-molded into the shape of the front of the painting? I suppose milling a block of die steel into the inverse of Starry Night would be an interesting software exercise.

Oh I can think of some reasons why...
.... (mutters under breath: pervert)

It's really an interesting experiment and I hope they keep it up. I'm not saying the US copyright & patent system is all bad (not at all), but I'm fascinated with watching an alternative play out. I wonder if, 20 years from now, we might have a significant anti-IP movement based on retaining competitiveness with the Chinese. (Plus, if you're a developing country, skipping a hundred years of technological development by just copying the latest best thing has to be useful.)

Anyway I love these little artifacts like the paintings. Another good one is the text on the back of pirated Chinese DVDs (which I don't buy myself), which is sometimes copied from reviews (including ones panning the movie - think big blowup text saying "TEDIOUS NONSENSE!! - Roger Ebert"), or cobbled together from other movies, or seems to have gone through English-Chinese-English translation. But the best part are the logos and markings, which are ersatz copies of the originals but often with typos - but such nice graphic art! I imagine some hard-working kid with a copy of Illustrator painstakingly copying the curves of the DVD-ROM logo, say.

A friend also has some pirate copies of Computer Science textbooks - the text is in English, but the spine has both English and a Chinese translation. And her family (Caucasian), who live in Shanghai, had copies of various famous paintings done with their heads substituted for the originals - she has an Andy Warhol copy that is hilarious.

Anyway, more likely China will move to a Western-style copyright system with effective enforcement in the end. My step-father had a pirate copy of an American dictionary that was made in Japan in the 60s or 70s, and I think I'm remembering right to say that they had similar levels of copying in industry & art during their period of development last century, and they seem to have a fairly normal and working copyright system now.

Sure, it's Little Lifestyle City in the Suburbs, but it also looks like someplace I could see living. And it's on the Light Rail.

(FYIage: Orenco = Oregon Nursery Company, a long-defunct tree and shrub grower. The old factory village of Orenco is across the tracks and down the road a bit.)

I don't care for the particular style of upscale cookie-cutter stucco architecture of Orenco Station neighborhood behind the faux, but besides the copious greenspace there's one thing I love about the place:

It has ALLEYS.

Real honest to goodness alleys lined with garages and garbage cans.

That's not too different from the US in the 19th Century, as I understand it. US copyright law applied only to US authors and artists; foreign works were not covered, and could be freely copied.

(Of course, most of those paintings that this particular Chinese outfit is copying aren't under copyright at all.)

One of the most interesting had a white woman sitting with her feet in a bowl into which a black pageboy was pouring a ewer of water. In the copy, both were Chinese, and there was an air of sexual complicity that was completely absent in the original. In another a slightly odd sheep had been transformed into a monkey. There was also the Sun King as a Mandarin, and a set of splendidly decadent plates ordered just before the Revolution whose intended owner was regrettably headless and unable to appreciate them by their arrival.

My great aunt and her daughter ran that. Just shut down after twenty-something years.

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that! My mom took me shopping there a month or so before my oldest son was born--bought him some absolutely darling Euro-style outfits (powder blue and much-besmocked, if memory serves) which I think he might have worn once each before descending into the sartorial jeans-and-hoodie abyss wherein he still resides. (There's just something precious about a 7YO in a Mr. Bungle t-shirt.)

Anyway, that was an absolutely delightful store and I'm sorry to hear it's gone.

Stefan, that's really interesting. My sense of Orenco Station is that the urban design is actually better than the design of the individual buildings--it does seem to be achieving the New Urbanist goal of engendering a sense of neighborhood. Oregon has a very gentle climate and I think making more use of the outside as a social space is healthy.

Larry, the problem is the light rail doesn't actually go much of anywhere but downtown--I commuted on it briefly--, and that's a 40-minute ride. There's some stuff in Beaverton, but the best westside mall is a good bus ride away from the station. Part of the area's planning is to create a series of neighborhoods along the rail system, but, like the trees, that hasn't matured yet.

Overall, I think neighborhoods like Orenco Station probably work better if there were a local streetcar--that allows for the creation of linear business districts--as well as the commuter-rail scale MAX, but getting the good citizens to pay for that would be, hmmm, interesting.

no, I was thinking of Groundhog Day.

no, I was thinking of Groundhog Day.

The Bob Shaw short story (The Giaconda Caper) had the Mona Lisa as the first frame in a DaVinci porno 'flip book' (hence multiple Mona Lisas, in this case each slightly different).

Evelyn Browne @19 got my original reference, the Douglas Adams Doctor Who script City of Death*, which had a time-displaced villain commissioning 6 copies of the Mona Lisa from DaVinci, so he could salt them away and sell them to collectors after the original was stolen from the Lourve in the 20th century (each collector thinking he was getting the original).

I am a fan of Groundhog Day, but I don't see the connection. I'm sure it will make sense after you've explained it, as I hope my joke** makes sense after I've explained it. The best jokes are only appreciated after they have been explained...***

* One of my favorites. Eleanor Bron and John Cleese in a cameo appearance play a pair of pretentious art gallery patrons admiring the Tardis (parked in an art gallery) as a piece of afunctional art. Doug Adams was proud of the script; he recycled elements of it for his first 'Dirk Gently Holistic Dectective Agency' story.

** Inspired (if that is the appropriate word) by the idea of Chinese knock-offs of the 'Mona Lisa'.

*** Okay, I know that's not true, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it...