Thomas Kinkade's death

[Chris Lange]

Kinkade and Crewdson are on the same level, visually for me.

Can't stand either of them, as far as their work goes.

 

[Vaughn]

Wallace Nutting (1861 - 1941) was an American (New England area) minister, furniture-maker and photographer. His furniture-making was of copies of older styles, expertly done.

At one time he hired up to 200 "colorists" to hand-color (and I suppose darkroom assistants to print) his photographs. Very popular as wedding presents. Sometimes the colorists would also sign Nutting's name on the print. He estimated that he sold 10 million prints. Sales geared towards the middle class.

I grew up with a couple of them on our walls. Not bad pieces, I preferred the two C. Watkins we had.

Tim -- I guess it was AA's musical background that influenced his printing (the old score vs performance thing). Oren Mills Sr died in 1978 -- his company of portrait studios and church directories was sold to Lifetouch last year.

 

[BrianShaw]

Oren Mills Sr died in 1978 -- his company of portrait studios and church directories was sold to Lifetouch last year.

I didn't know they were sold. Last week I was thinking of starting a separate thread because I, for the third time in this lifetime, participated in a church directory. Each time it was for a fairly large church (about 4,000 registered families) and the production-line aspect is quite impressive. The resulting portraits are somewhere between OK an ddreadful if you ask me. What I found interesting this time, though, is the sales aspect of their "free chruch directory". I always left that to my wife. I only saw what we bought, and what a few other families bought. In 30 minutes I think I saw each family buy between $150 and $400 worth of their product. The salesperson's opening salvo was a $350 package. "WOW, what a racket" was my first response adn I'm happy that I could keep that within the confines of my noggin without ever moving my mouth. I really wonder how much they make from these "free chruch directory" schemes. Must be a fortune... and most families seemed very happy with their work. The mass appeal and mass marketting analogy seems similar. I was wondering how many families will be replacing the Thos. Kinkade art hanging over hteir couch with a big Olan Mills framed portrait. :confused:

 

[Vaughn]

I didn't know they were sold....

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/nov/09/chattanooga-based-olan-mills-sold-lifetouch/

 

[BrianShaw]

Thanks, Vaughn... I'm so far behind in reading the newpaper!

 

[removed account4]

Ooh, good, a fight about "art"!

naaah im not fighting, i am trying to figure out what i think as i write these posts... i am kind of "conflicted" .
part of me is inspired by kinkade, how he managed to create all these scenes
that people love/loved to buy ... and part of me wonders how people could buy
the stuff he is / was selling. i guess i was off the mark comparing adams to kinkade
but sometimes one has to make an absurd comparison to figure out where you stand ...

i wonder who is going to be the next (self-)mass produced artist ..
and i wonder if whoever it will be, will have the stamina to create hundreds/thousands of paintings
and make millions from selling reproductions, and stay alive past 55.

 

[eclarke]

So...How many here have sold out by receiving money for things they do? Only people who get no money, food, clothing, shelter or anything else for any of their efforts at anything can truly call themselves "artists".. I put dirty words in quotation marks..They guy made a successful living..

 

[blansky]

I don't like AA just because of the amount of manipulation it takes to create those prints, as if they aren't prints of those negatives, but fabrications for the lust of the general public.

Interesting opinion.

Firstly I don't think he was making prints for the public, although that was done later.

The way I see it he was observing a scene and seeing or fore-seeing what he could do to "improve" it. That's part of the reason for having incredibly exposed negatives.

He was sort of a contradiction because he was part of F64 which was the antithesis to the pictorialists or romanticism he wished to replace. I think they saw their work as realism.

The irony is that his work is not really realism but maybe hyper-realism which could be described as a form of romanticism of a particular scene.

 

[Vaughn]

...But good expressions of what AA wanted to present. It just wasn't what AA shot.

That said, I do a bit of manipulation of my scenic landscapes, it's part of pulling in what I saw to the material I have available.

tim in san jose

Also this begs the question was AA (or you) totally color blind? B&W photography is one major step beyond what any of us see/shoot.

 

[ROL]

Reading many of these sour grapes posts referencing AA, I would simply suggest that it would at least be wise to spend some time actually reading about the man and his art before categorizing and judging him. There is one autobiography as well as the book "Letters...". And then spend some time in the Sierra Nevada, away from the burger joints.

 

[Brian C. Miller]

Also this begs the question was AA (or you) totally color blind? B&W photography is one major step beyond what any of us see/shoot.

Adams did a good bit of photography in color. However, it just wasn't his bag, as it were. There was a pretty hefty book published awhile ago title, "Ansel Adams in Color." Decent photographs, but nothing really spectacular. I suspect that he just didn't pursue it.

 

[removed account4]

Reading many of these sour grapes posts referencing AA, I would simply suggest that it would at least be wise to spend some time actually reading about the man and his art before categorizing and judging him. There is one autobiography as well as the book "Letters...". And then spend some time in the Sierra Nevada, away from the burger joints.

sour grapes ?

i hope it isn't me you are referring to.

i have read quite a bit about him, i have no way to get to the sierra nevadas, and really don't
know why i need to put my tripod in his holes and see the sights he saw to have an opinion
of the work he produced. if i could get away from my obligations
to go there, it wouldn't really change my mind about "the grand landscape".
i can understand why a lot of people LOVE his work, to each their own

...i am more interested in the landscape photographers in the 1800s who had massive obstacles
to overcome in order to be able to get to remote areas on foot or horse and photograph something for the first time
using a process that was quite different than modern photography ... it isn't "the view" that interests me
it is what they had to do to make the photographs that interests me more.


john

 

[Vaughn]

Adams did a good bit of photography in color. However, it just wasn't his bag, as it were. There was a pretty hefty book published awhile ago title, "Ansel Adams in Color." Decent photographs, but nothing really spectacular. I suspect that he just didn't pursue it.

Not quite my point -- just the simple point that if we photograph and print in B&W, then we are not photographing just what we see...thus seemingly weakening Tim in San Jose's point that AA's manipulation during printing drastically changed "what he saw".

I find John's position on AA to be an extreme one (that AA = Kinkade as artists). And as with any extremist, his view helps in defining a middle path...as do the extremists who would award AA with sainthood. Argueing with extremists can be entertaining, but rather fruitless, since a good arguement or debate requires the use of logic and the ability (and willingness) to understand the other's POV. .

 

[Alan W]

"The World is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks"A little wisdom from HCB.

 

[Vaughn]

"The World is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks"A little wisdom from HCB.

And poets making poems about love, and writers writing stories about the soul, and musicians writing songs to move the spirit. HCB needed to chill.

 

[blansky]

"The World is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks"A little wisdom from HCB.

Yes, but I believe HBC was in Europe at the time and Adams and Weston were in Big Sur.

Perspectives often differ due to location.

 

[Alan Klein]

Adams certainly knew how to market himself much as Kinkade did, I will not contest this. You said something about Adams posters. Though they do exist online I have yet to see Ansel Adams coffee mugs, puzzles, mousepads and decorative plates in any brick and mortar stores or on the Ansel Adams gallery site. However, I have seen Kinkade on all these things pretty much everywhere that sells home decor.

Here you go.

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[artonpaper]

Reading all the responses since I first responded has given me much food for thought, but reading over what I wrote earlier, I still feel the same way. So, I guess I know too much about Adams that I can't help but feel the seriousness of work. Whether Kinkade was cynical or not, I don't know, but like I said, I can't help but feel cynical when I kook at his outpouring. I knew Lisette Model, and she thought AA's work was boring. I'd never heard anyone say that before, but after that remark, I was never able to look at his work with the dewy eyed admiration I had prior to that. But I just saw a large Moonrise at the AIPAD show and I lingered and I found myself becoming entranced.

Some of the remarks about gallery art and art for the masses are very interesting, but that's an old conundrum that will always be with us. There is a polarity in all the arts, whether it's Ogden Nash and Sylvia Plath, Kenny G and Coltrane, or Kinkade and Odd Nurdrum.

I'll take Nurdrum over Kinkade, The Parke-Harrisons over Adams, (and Hendrix over Clapton). There's an audience for everything. And selling work isn't selling out. I just bought new supplies from a print sale. Making work with the main intention of selling it, that's selling out.

 

[Darkroom317]

Here you go.

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Read further in my post. I didn't say they don't exist. I am saying that I have no seen them in shops however I am aware that they can be found online. My point was that such objects are not nearly as prevalent as with Kinkade.

 

[moose10101]

I hadn't heard about his passing until now. Did he go toward the light?

Too soon?

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I hadn't heard about his passing until now. Did he go toward the light?

Too soon?

I'd say more like he circled the drain one time too many and was flushed with the turd and the paper.

 

[E. von Hoegh]

If you gild a turd, sell it for a huge price and get people to wax idiotic about it's percieved "virtues", guess what? It's still a turd.

 

[artonpaper]

I hadn't heard about his passing until now. Did he go toward the light?

Too soon?

Best reply yet, this.

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

He was sort of a contradiction because he was part of F64 which was the antithesis to the pictorialists or romanticism he wished to replace. I think they saw their work as realism.

The irony is that his work is not really realism but maybe hyper-realism which could be described as a form of romanticism of a particular scene.

That's why Berenice Abbott, among the few to call shenanigans on the Straight's fight against Pictorialism, called Adams, Weston, and the later Stieglitz "Super-Pictorialists", in the sense that they exhibited the same amount of print fetishism than Mortensen.

The main difference between f/64 and Pictorialism is the kind of painting they associate with. The former with Clement Greenberg-championed flat, geometrical modernism; the latter with late 19th C. Symbolist or pre-Raphaelite paintings.

It's my hope that in future histories of photography, "straight" photography stops being seen as a break from Pictorialism, but rather like a competing school with similar aesthetic values.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I've heard on my local NPR station in Sacramento that the original Thomas Kinkade gallery in Placerville sold one of his paintings for $150K. I think there are better investments in art. I'll bet the poor investor didn't do well investing in Beanie Babies so he or she decided to invest in a Kinkade.