In our attempt at profiling some of the more unusual spaces around the region, and in the spirit of looking beyond the four walls of the gallery and museum (though not exactly beyond), I thought of bringing Thomas Kinkade’s Signature Gallery in Malaysia to our readers’ attention. I’m not entirely sure when the gallery opened in Malaysia, but I’m quite positive it has been around for more than a few years, having discovered it on one of my summer holidays back in Malaysia during my university days.

How and why Kinkade has such an established presence in Malaysia is beyond me, although it’s not hard to believe that the traditional values of ‘nature, family and home life’ appeal very much to an average Malaysian, with its universal message of domestic values transcending the initial support it receives from a growing number of Christian converts who constitute  the more affluent segment of the city’s non-Malay community.

Kinkade, who operates his studio more like a Rembrandt workshop or a Warhol-ian art factory than a 19th century seclusion artist, is a self-dubbed ‘painter of light’. To understand why there isn’t a glint of irony in his practice and his understanding of art, I have turned to Susan Orlean’s insightful essay on Thomas Kinkade, published in the New Yorker in 2001.

Her discerning piece reflects on Kinkade’s inextricable connection to American culture, his commitment to and opinion on the role that art plays in society, the controversy surrounding his popularity despite being dismissed wholesale by the art world and most importantly, why so many people love him.

Art for Everybody

by Susan Orlean
The New Yorker
October 15, 2001

One recent sultry afternoon, inside the Bridgewater Commons mall, in central New Jersey, across from The Limited, down the hall from a Starbucks, next door to the Colorado Pen Company, and just below Everything Yogurt, a woman named Glenda Parker was making a priceless family heirloom for a young couple and their kid. This was taking place in the Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery, a plush and flatteringly illuminated, independently owned, branded distribution channel for the art-based products of America’s most profitable artist, Thomas Kinkade. The young couple were from a moderately priced gated community not far from the mall, and they were bashful and pleased because they had never bought a family heirloom before. Also, they had never bought a painting before. Actually, they still hadn’t bought a painting, since what they were buying was not a painting per se but a fifteen-hundred-dollar lithographic reproduction of a Thomas Kinkade painting, printed on textured-brushstroke canvas with an auto-pen Kinkade signature in the lower right-hand corner.

This was not an ordinary day at the gallery: it was a Master Highlighter Event, a two-day guest appearance by one of Kinkade’s specially trained assistants, who would highlight any picture bought during the event for free. Highlighting a picture is not that different from highlighting your hair: it entails stippling tiny bright dots of paint on the picture to give it more texture and luminescence. The customer could sit with the highlighter and watch the process, and even make requests — for a little more pink in the rosebushes, say, or a bit more green on the trees. Some highlighter — Glenda was one — would even let the customers dab some paint on the picture themselves, so it would be truly one-of-a-kind.

“Is this your first Kinkade?” Glenda asked the young woman. They were sitting in front of a large easel, on which the couple’s picture had been propped. Beside Glenda was a digital kitchen timer, which she had set for the highlighting time limit of fifteen minutes, and a Lucite palette heaped with small blobs of oil paint.

“Yes,” the woman said. “It’s our first.”

“Well, congratulations,” Glenda said. She smiled warmly.

For the complete essay, please visit http://www.susanorlean.com/articles/art_for_everybody.html

(SS)