My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (35 page)

Suddenly, Glenda’s timer buzzed. Janice peered over to examine
Evening Majesty.
“Oh, I love the way the smoke came out!” she said. “Oh, and look!” she said, pointing to the bottom corner of the picture. “She highlighted the puppy dog, too!” Everyone nodded.

Janice went to help a customer choose a picture for his wife’s birthday, and Glenda freshened her paints. She is one of thirty master highlighters. Her training involved a seven-day workshop followed by an exam testing her knowledge of the paintings and how to highlight them and her knowledge of Kinkade himself: his birthday, the names of his children, where he met his wife, details of his childhood—in other words, the sorts of intimate tidbits that could be sprinkled into the conversation during the highlighting and that would make people feel they were getting not merely a reproduction of a painting, but a chance to connect with Thomas Kinkade. Glenda said she had been highlighting for almost a year. During the week, she works in a gift shop in California, and two or three weekends a month she travels to a gallery event. Her dream is to travel with Kinkade to Europe and do gallery events there.

Currently, there are signature galleries in Canada, England, and Scotland; the company plans to expand throughout Europe and then take on Japan. Glenda said that while she is highlighting, customers tell her about their lives and often about some sadness they feel is lifted when they look at Kinkade’s work. “I get a lot of cancer survivors,” she said. “I meet a lot of people who have just lost someone. I send the most special stories I hear back to Thom.”

Another customer plunked down in the chair next to Glenda. She reset her timer for fifteen minutes. “I’m getting
Hometown
something,” the customer said. “I already have
Hometown
something else. What is it?
Hometown Morning? Hometown Evening?
I don’t know.”

“You’re building a great portfolio,” Janice Schafer said. “They’re nice investments. And this one’s almost sold out. And they do have a history of appreciation. We have some secondary-market pieces here. This one,
Julianne’s Cottage,
was released for a few hundred dollars in 1992, and now it’s thirty-seven hundred and thirty dollars.”

“Well, I like the one I’m getting,” the customer said. “It’s like a picture of some tightly knit neighborhood where everything is well and everyone is friendly to each other. It’s nice.”

“It would be nice with this one, too,” Janice said, pointing to another piece hanging across the gallery. She admired it for a moment and then clasped her hands and said, “You know, he’s like a national treasure.”

Not only the highlighters, but the gallery staff, the Media Arts receptionists, even the people who build the frames and stretch the canvases know Kinkade’s biography by heart: that he was raised in Placerville, California; that his father left home when Thomas was five; that his mother told him he would be the man of the family. That he was good at everything he tried—math, civics, and especially drawing—that when he was about fourteen he set up a little concession selling his drawings for two dollars each, and that every time he sold one he would marvel at how he could make money on something that had taken him only fifteen minutes to do. That he went to what he jokingly calls “a nice little conservative Christian school,” Berkeley, and left after two years to attend the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. That when he was twenty he experienced a Christian awakening and that it changed his art—it stopped being about his fears and anxieties and became optimistic and inspirational, with themes like hometowns and perfect days and natural beauty, and millions of people responded. It’s as good a story as you could hope for if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life’s bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it’s easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.

Kinkade’s commercial awakening occurred in 1989, when he formed Lightpost Publishing with a business partner, Ken Raasch. His paintings were selling well, but he decided that he wanted “to engulf as many hearts as possible with art,” a goal that would be hindered by selling only original work. Instead, Kinkade opened a chain of galleries and began producing high-quality digital reproductions of his paintings on specially treated paper, which sold for a few hundred dollars each. A digital image could also be soaked in water, peeled off the paper, and affixed to a stretched canvas, so that it showed the texture of the canvas the way a real painting would. These canvas transfers could be sold as they were, or they could be accented with paint by a master highlighter or by a special apprentice to Kinkade (“Studio Proofs” and “Renaissance Editions”) or by Kinkade himself (“Masters Editions”); the transfers now fetch anywhere from fifteen hundred dollars for the standard numbered editions to thirty-four thousand dollars for the prints that Kinkade highlighted himself. The originals were no longer for sale at any price, and the number of each edition was restricted, and the image was “suspended” once it was sold out.

In 1994, Kinkade was named Artist of the Year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers, and the demand for his pictures was growing so fast that he was able to take his company public.
Business Week
named it one of the “hot growth” companies of 1995. A Kinkade picture had become “collectible”—one of the countless items valued not just for their own merits, but for their supposed rarity and potential to appreciate because they have been intentionally produced in a restricted quantity. According to a 1999 survey, the collectibles market is worth an estimated ten billion dollars a year. The market includes limited-edition Boyds Bears, which are costumed teddies; Adam Binder’s Fruit Faeries, which are marble-powder-and-resin creatures with names like Humble Umhalubhala the Apple Faerie; the Ebony Visions sculptures of Thomas Blackshear, who describes his work as Afro-Nouveau; a series called Just the Right Shoe, which are miniature right shoes in different styles, made by an artist who calls herself Raine; and all varieties of dolls and unicorn figures and paperweights and Olszewski Miniatures and Cameo Girls vases and Snowbabies and Precious Moments moppets and Steinbach limited-edition nutcrackers, and, of course, Hummel figurines.

There are scores of limited-edition painters in addition to Kinkade, and they account for some seven hundred million dollars of the collectibles market each year. They include every sort of landscape and still-life painter, and wildlife and marine-life painter, and Christian-themed painter, and sports painter (and at least one multidimensional painter, Arnold Friberg, whose subject matter is described on one website as ranging from “the Bible to American football”).

Kinkade is not the only multimillionaire among the limited-edition artists: Bev Doolittle, whose art is described by dealers as whimsical, mystical, and spiritual, has sold sixty million dollars’ worth of prints in the last decade; Wyland (“the world’s premier ocean artist”) has sold more than fifty million dollars’ worth of whale pictures; Terry Redlin, according to
Time
magazine, sells twenty million dollars’ worth of Americana images each year. Like Kinkade, Redlin has stopped selling his originals. He now displays them in the Redlin Art Center in Watertown, South Dakota, which opened in 1997 and drew four hundred thousand visitors in its first six months. According to the museum’s website, “Certainly no one would disagree that Terry’s artwork, which holds such a special place in the homes and hearts of so many Americans, should be preserved in a public setting.” Redlin’s limited editions—“Affordable Decorator Art by Terry Redlin,” as one dealer advertises it—are available instead, although only just available. Because they are expensive and might “sell out,” the prints seem more precious than ordinary reproductions that are issued in unlimited quantity.

People like to own things they think are valuable, and they are titillated by the prospect that the things they own might be even more valuable than they thought. The high price of limited editions is part of their appeal: It implies that they are choice and exclusive and that only a certain class of people will be able to afford them—a limited edition of people with taste and discernment.

“I created a system of marketing compatible with American art,” Kinkade said to me recently. “I believe in ‘aspire to’ art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It’s good to dream about things. It’s like dreaming of owning a Rolex—instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print.” In fact, a lot of limited-edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade.

LAST MAY
,
I visited the Media Arts Group headquarters, in a plain brown building in a commercial district near San José Airport. Inside, the office had the décor that characterizes all the Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries: The furniture was plump and chintz covered, and the walls were a soothing forest green, and a gas flame in the fireplace lapped at a ceramic log, so that whether you were in a mall in central New Jersey or an industrial park in Northern California, you would feel you had entered Thomas Kinkade’s world, where it is always a dusky autumn evening in a small but prosperous English town. The day I visited was actually hot, dry, and blindingly bright, the height of spring in the middle of Silicon Valley, and dust from airport construction gave the air a blurry glow. I had come at a lively moment for Media Arts: The company had recently launched a new chain of stores called the Masters of Light Galleries, featuring three artists whose work had been selected from the more than two thousand who applied. The Masters of Light Galleries are part of a plan to diversify Media Arts Group, because stock analysts have worried about the company’s reliance on one charismatic figure and about the possibility that Kinkade’s popularity has crested and will inevitably ebb, his paintings going the way of so many collectibles before them.

“Analysts are fascinated by the company,” Craig Fleming, the Media Arts CEO, explained. (Fleming has since left Media Arts.) “But they were never excited about the company based on just Thom. Now, with the diversification, they’re starting to do due diligence and pay attention to the stock.”

Fleming is not an art guy. He was a sales guy who came to Media Arts after twenty-five years of working for nutritional product companies, home party businesses, and the Kirby vacuum-cleaning company. He said that when he first got to Media Arts, he would go around asking, “What’s our number one product?” and would then supply the answer himself: “Our number one product is the Thomas Kinkade business opportunity!” In 1998, shortly after he took over, the stock price pitched downward, suffering from the industry’s weakness, the company’s overexpansion, and Wall Street’s coolness toward small-cap companies. Fleming oversaw the sale of most company-owned galleries; all but two Thomas Kinkade galleries are now owned by franchisees. According to a recent quarterly report, the company also developed “a new retail promotional event involving appearances by Thomas Kinkade at selected Galleries which substantially reduced the decline in same store sales, increased product pull-through, lowered retail inventory, improved accounts receivable and strengthened our cash position.” In other words, wherever Kinkade appears, customers buy pictures.

“Thom will go to a gallery, and twenty-five hundred people will show up,” Fleming said. “He speaks for about thirty minutes, and afterward they come up to him and talk. It’s very emotional, some of them are crying and saying, ‘Here’s how you have affected me.’ ” He paused and then gestured toward a large Kinkade hanging in his office. “We believe that the walls of the home are the new frontier for branding. Thom always says that there are forty walls in the average home. Our job is to fill them.”

Last month, Taylor Woodrow Homes and Media Arts Group opened the Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, a gated development in Vallejo, California. According to promotional material, it is a “magical community” featuring “meandering sidewalks, benches and water features, which are designed to enrich home owners’ lives with endless visual surprises and delights.” There are four house models available, and they are named after Kinkade’s four daughters—Chandler, Merritt, Everett, and Winsor—and will be priced from four hundred thousand dollars up.

THOMAS KINKADE LIVES
in a large, handsome house in a magical suburban community the name of which I am not at liberty to disclose. It is easy to understand his wish for privacy: Ten million people own some product featuring his name, and most editions are signed with ink containing DNA from his hair or blood, to prevent fakes. He likes to say he has a retro—“but not Amish”—lifestyle. His children are homeschooled by his wife, Nanette, and they don’t watch television, but he owns “a hell of a lot of stuff, a nice car and so forth.” He works in an old stone cottage on the grounds of his house. The cottage is filled with his favorite paintings: an original by his idol, Norman Rockwell; a seascape by Glenn Wessels, who taught him art when he was a teenager; a pastel by his father, an amateur artist who, according to Kinkade, never made anything of his life. In the main room of the cottage are easels, shelves of reference books, and a high-tech color-balanced lighting system that provides the constant effect of overcast midday sun. At the time, Kinkade was working on a painting of two horses grazing in the yard of a trim stone cottage. The horses weren’t finished yet, and next to the easel he had pinned a photograph of a horse that appeared to have been torn out of a cigarette ad. The room was clean and orderly and didn’t smell of turpentine or brush cleaner.