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Almost as soon as you open your computer you sense that something is wrong. It takes too long to load your background screen, or there is a lot of unexpected disk activity causing your hard drive to sound like a pack of dwarves in their mine, or when you open your browser there is some awful ShopMe toolbar added to it. No matter how hard you try or how may times you run your antivirus software, you can’t get rid of it.

That was the sort of feeling I had the first time I was exposed to a Thomas Kinkade painting. Now, I realize Kinkade is an easy target for art snobs, but I am an incorrigible middlebrow. I have so many guilty pleasures (ABBA, Coldplay, Michael Mann, Tom Clancy, Disney animation) that spend most of my time as a consumer of art feeling guilty. My wife, then my fiancée, gushed over it, and said she may want to acquire some pieces by this artist to hang in our [prospective] home. Without hesitation, I told her that no piece by this artist would ever hang in my home as long as I had breath in my body. My reaction was that visceral and that immediate.

By all rights, I should love Thomas Kinkade and his numerous imitators. I am disgustingly average; I live in a median neighborhood, earn a median income, married at the median age, have 2.3 children [don’t ask about the .3]. From the outside, I am just another of that endless torrent of faceless commuters you experience as obstructions on your morning drive into work from your suburban sanctuary. Kinkade does well among my demographic. From all appearances he was a talented artist, and from what I’ve read about him, a devout Christian. I have even seen some of his works that work very well for me, painted before he became a brand name, which have the same artistic effect on me as painters like Theodore Clement Steele or John Singer Sargent. However, it doesn’t appear you can purchase prints of these “good” paintings. So why did I, no art critic, have such a negative reaction to this man and his work?

At first, I thought it was because his paintings were garish, but there are a lot of garish artists I love. Who could be more garish than Thomas Hart Benton, yet I’ll drive 75 miles out of my way to see one of his WPA murals in a post office. Or who could have a color sense more guaranteed to violate and outrage the delicate sensibilities of Anglo-Saxon norteamericanos than the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera? Rivera’s work has the additional drawback of being as polemical as a copy of the Daily Worker, but I was moved to tears by his mural of the Aviator in the Palace of Fine arts in Mexico City, and Kinkade does not even approach Rivera for garishness.

Then I thought it must be that I experienced his paintings as Pelagian. I don’t know why I would object to Pelagian art. Walt Disney had Pelagianism down to a formula by Pinocchio, and I think Pinocchio is one of the three greatest animated movies of all time. Indeed, my taste for heresy in art goes far beyond Pelagianism. You can’t be a proper landscape artist if you don’t have at least a sympathy for pantheism, and the hallucinatory images of Charles Burchfield are among some of my very favorites.

I think that my objection to the late Mr. Kinkade’s work is the same as that of Catholic blogger Thomas L. McDonald, “I understood Kinkade better when I started seeing him not as an artist in the tradition of the Hudson River School who went spectacularly wrong, but as a fantasy illustrator like his good friend and collaborator, artist James Gurney. He wasn’t a Rockwellian realist like Terry Redlin. He was a painter of fantasy landscapes, like Roger Dean with cozy cottages.”

That was it. Kinkade was painting scenes not from the world I live in, but from the world where you go to live when you Accept Jesus Christ As Your Personal Lord And Savior. It is a world where everything, even the forces of nature and the laws of perspective accommodate themselves to make everything Right. It is a word where even though there is a gale raging in the upper atmosphere, the smoke form your cozy chimney rises as perpendicularly as a flagpole. What makes matters even worse is that I think this world really exists if you are sufficiently anesthetized and unreflective. I meet people from this world from time to time. They are uniformly good people, better than I am, or at least better at resisting the temptations of this squalid world. They don’t waste their time with anime or Quentin Tarantino. They are happy with Positive Hits Radio, Fireproof, CCM, and Veggie Tales. So maybe the creepy feeling I have is that Thomas Kinkade is painting from life, not from his own imagination, which would make him kind of a Thomas Upton Pickman in reverse.

Like I mentioned before, my wife responded very positively to Kinkade, and she thinks I am only hurting myself by subjecting myself to the polluted products of the world outside the Christian Shtetl. After 25 years of marriage I have to admit that I don’t really understand her vision of Christianity, which is as alien to me as if someone had landed from Mars. I have this nagging suspicion that it may be my life’s work to learn to cherish and appreciate it.