RICH MAN, POOR MAN

In a painter’s life, it is generally the case that success is the worst thing of all.

--Vincent van Gogh, who never realized commercial success in his life yet agonized over its possibilities, wrote those words in a letter to his mother in 1890.

It’s a good thing van Gogh isn’t around to see Thomas Kinkade’s success; it would render him speechless.

Kinkade, 42, who has been dubbed “the painter of light,” is everywhere. Although you can no longer buy his originals (he doesn’t need the cash, so he keeps them in a vault), you can purchase a canvas-backed lithograph (for anywhere from $900 to $15,000), a plate, a snow globe or a blanket to cuddle under while you lounge in a Thomas Kinkade La-Z-Boy chair. You can write letters on a Thomas Kinkade note pad and drink coffee from a cup decorated with one of his paintings.

And you won’t have to look very far to find these items.

In California, there are 78 “signature galleries”--galleries carrying only Kinkade’s work. You can also check the New York Stock Exchange to see how Media Arts Group Inc., the San Jose-based company devoted solely to Kinkade’s works, is doing. Soon, you might be able to live in a Thomas Kinkade home or even a village: Media Arts is in discussion with U.S. Home Corp. in Houston to build houses modeled after those in his paintings.

These paintings feature quaint villages, thatched-roof cottages, lamplight glowing from windows, gardens where everything is in bloom, city scenes that have a 19th century feel to them; friendly neighbors are waving to each other, and there isn’t a homeless person or a boarded-up building in sight. They have titles such as “Simpler Times,” “Beyond Spring Gate,” “Beside Still Waters.”

“I believe in a simple way of life,” Kinkade says from his home, a short drive away from the San Jose factory that employs 450 people who mass-produce his lithographs. “I am a symbol of a good life that people dream of and maybe haven’t been able to achieve. I’m not perfect, but I have a happy family, a happy life. My paintings are illustrations of that.”

Kinkade’s fans are legion and have made him a wealthy man: In fiscal 1999, Media Arts posted revenues of $126 million. Kinkade and his wife, Nanette, own 27% of the stock, making them worth an estimated $30 million. The results of Kinkade’s appearances on QVC cable network, to sell his prints or his book, “Lightposts for Living,” are watched carefully by Media Arts Group, which calculated that in one 1999 QVC show, 10,000 copies of the book were sold every minute. He says he has had to curtail personal appearances at galleries and bookstores; so many fans were arriving days early, camping out in RVs that neighborhoods were inconvenienced.

Everything in the Kinkade empire is meticulously cataloged, including what Kinkade calls “the tear file” of letters. In one, a woman who had adopted several children with special needs, wrote that one of them, an autistic boy, spoke for the first time when looking at a Kinkade seascape. (He pointed and said, “Boat.”) Others claim that gazing at his prints have helped them through chemotherapy or grief.

But the enduring question, amid the adulation, loyalty and entrepreneurial talent, is: Is this art?

There has long been a friction between art and commerce. Even van Gogh saw the danger in commercial success. Norman Rockwell, for most of his life, was called an illustrator, but not an artist. The late sculptor Frederick Hart, who created “Ex Nihilo,” the west facade of the Washington National Cathedral, made a lot of money but garnered no critical recognition for his work. Margaret and Walter Keane’s paintings--the children with the huge, bulging eyes--were bought by adoring fans to the disgust of serious art critics.

No one, though, has taken marketing and merchandising to the lengths that Thomas Kinkade has. That, and the fact that representational art has not been well received critically for the last couple of decades, has created resentment.

Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, called Kinkade’s work “naive postmodernism.” Jack Rutberg, a Los Angeles art dealer, dismissed it as “the pet rock of the art world.” Michael Zakian, director of the Frederick Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, says Kinkade “takes motifs and reduces them to one-dimensional cliches. The colors are actually grating.” Kinkade’s own description of his work as “comfort art” defies Zakian’s opinion that serious art must engage or challenge us.

Kinkade, a tall, burly, down-to-earth man whose thick hands could pass for a farmer’s, is aware that the debate about what is art and what is kitsch extends across the spectrum. He mentions a contemporary artist whose “iconoclastic” work has garnered attention as well as criticism: Tracey Emin’s 1999 exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London was called “My Bed.” It was, literally, a bed she had inhabited for weeks. It was stained, littered with soiled underwear, a used condom, cigarette butts and other flotsam. Many people thought it was brilliant; many others thought it was trash. The debate is similar to the one about Kinkade’s work.

Kinkade says he’d like to sit down in a room with his critics and explain what he calls his “populist format” for art, his “life-affirming” alternative.

“I view myself as a spokesman of modern culture,” he says. “I want to create things of meaning, influence and shape the visual environment. The most effective utilization of art is to make it accessible, bring people into the worlds you want in a way that’s compelling, understandable.” He seems unfazed by the harsh criticism of what he calls an “elitist” art world.

Kinkade grew up in surroundings that were definitely not elitist.

He was the middle child in a broken home; there was little money. After his father left them, his mother worked as a notary, earning $5 for each job. They resided in the small Northern California town of Placerville, much of that time in a trailer.

Their mother was a devoutly religious woman, something Thomas inherited. She used to tell her children, “God will provide.” She also, her son notes, had a woeful sense of direction. Watching his mother continually get lost gave Kinkade “an obsession with always knowing where I am.”

His escape from the poverty and the shame of being from a broken home was to submerge himself in a world of illusion, to draw and paint. Pat Kinkade, his younger brother who now runs a signature gallery in Texas, remembers Thomas always drawing with crayons and painting with watercolors. When he could finally afford oil paints, he filled their modest home with canvases.

He found, in his own life, the domestic happiness he longed for as a child. He married his childhood sweetheart, Nanette, and they have four daughters, ranging from 3 to 12 years old. In keeping with what he calls his devotion to a simpler life, his oldest daughters are being home schooled by his wife and a visiting teacher; there is no television in the Kinkade home.

“I do utilize the media,” he says. “I would rather watch my kids playing, though, than surf the Net.”

His workplace is a second home, steps away from the family home. He walks along a garden path early in the morning and enters a spacious living room with tall windows and a huge stone fireplace--his art studio. On this day, there is a painting of Yosemite on his easel, with the array of soothing colors one would expect from a Kinkade painting. There is a photograph of a cottage in the English countryside. And a small oil painting that seems out of place--a dark alleyway, a lonely city scene, at night or maybe just before dawn. There is a mystery to it that makes one lean closer, peer into the shadows.

It’s a painting that Kinkade did in his 20s, before what he calls his “spiritual awakening,” a transformation that he describes as a feeling of “light coming in.”

“Suddenly I needed to express art from the new wellspring of completion I felt. Instead of being compelled to paint because I felt pain, I was inspired to paint because I felt joy. I let God become my art agent. I said, ‘Please open the doors you want me to go through, close the doors you don’t want me to go through, and make the difference between them real obvious.’ ”

He has begun giving back some of his wealth. The Thomas Kinkade Foundation makes grants to people Kinkade deems “traditional representational artists,” those who share his vision of “life-affirming art.” He wants to open galleries devoted solely to these artists. He also wants to meet with the next U.S. president and discuss how to supplement school art programs whose budgets have been cut.

This attitude has softened at least one critic of his work. Peter Frank, art critic for L.A. Weekly, who dismisses Kinkade’s work as “low brow pretending to be high brow,” adds: “I begrudge his success less because he wants to give back.”

In the entryway of the house that is Kinkade’s studio is a Norman Rockwell original, a boy sitting on a weather vane, high above the rooftops of the town. “This is not just a boy on a weather vane,” Kinkade explains. “This is about the humility of beginnings, the soaring of the human spirit, the ability to go beyond our upbringing.” He points to the birds in flight above the boy’s head, and a tiny wedge of sea in the bottom corner of the canvas. The boy is looking out across the town to the sea, to a schooner--dreaming, Kinkade feels, of another life.

Rockwell received recognition as an artist posthumously, including a recent 1999 traveling exhibit. Will the same ever happen to Kinkade?

“Only time makes great art universal,” Frank says. Yet, so far is Kinkade from being acknowledged a serious artist, let alone a great one, that he may have to content himself with the adulation of millions of fans, the comfort of millions of dollars, and the undisputed accomplishment of having become the most commercially successful living artist.