God's own Lite-Brite

Thomas Kinkade's deliberately inspirational and dreamy images of landscapes and street scenes have brought "God's light" into people's lives, the artist says.

The self-proclaimed "Painter of Light" says he's a devout Christian for the past 20 years. "When I got saved, God became my art agent," he said in a 2004 video biography.

But Kinkade has a dark side, some former employees, gallery operators and others contend.

Some former gallery owners depict Kinkade as a ruthless businessman. Kinkade denies the accusations, but last month a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Association ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries.

Not only are his business practices under scrutiny, but many people have come forward to say that his personal behavior is anything but like the wholesome image on which he's built his empire.

Ex-employees and others have accused Kinkade of:

• getting drunk and heckling illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas
• cursing at a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell of a barstool
• manhandling a woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Indiana, while saying "You've got great tits!"
• urinating on a statue of Winnie the Pooh outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying, "This one's for you, Walt."

While working as a film animator and peddling his paintings in grocery store parking lots, he spent his life's savings on creating prints of his artwork. His gamble paid off, and now he has a lucrative career painting and selling originals and prints of what the L.A. Times calls "his distinctly romantic, idealized images of street scenes, lighthouses, country cottages and landscapes.... a world without sharp edges, all warm and fuzzily aglow with setting suns and streetlights and luminescent windows."

The Times said:

Critics have described Kinkade's works — with titles such as "Sunset on Lamplight Lane" and "The Garden of Prayer" — as little more than mass-produced kitsch. But that has not deterred the multitudes who pay from a few hundred dollars for paper prints to $10,000 or more for canvas editions he has signed and retouched.

"It's mainstream art, not art you have to look at to try to understand, or have an art degree to know whether it's good or not," said Mike Koligman, a longtime fan who with his wife owns Kinkade galleries in San Diego and Utah.

"This is God-given talent," another Kinkade fan said. "He is a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci or Monet. There is no one in our generation who can paint like that."

There aren't any other painters in our generation making the kind of money he is, either.

Thomas Kinkade | Mass Market Art | Kitsch