RANDOM SCRIBBLINGS

The excruciatingly twee Kinkade oeuvre consists of biblically inspired, light-infused romantic landscapes: rustic, wisteria-strangled villages, babbling brooks straddled by mossy stone bridges, rose-enrobed Cotswold cottages with gently smoking chimneys, glistening gazebos, lighthouses, etc. Though clearly intended to impart a cozy, fresh-baked-muffin, home-at-last feeling, this overload of feel-good iconography creeps me out deeply. It’s not my fault! Mr. Kinkade provides no clear narrative and no clues as to what is occurring behind those misty hedgerows and suspiciously glowing lattice windows, leaving me to assume the worst. Is Mrs. Kinkade pulling a Bundt cake out of her oven? Is Granny Kinkade faggoting the perimeter of a doily? I don’t think so!

As far as I’m concerned, inside every Kinkade cottage is a veritable bloodbath, a Pasolini-esque hellhole where—at the very least—children are cannibalized, and Granny Kinkade is fed dead rats by Satan and forced to admit to terrible crimes she never committed. Come back to the five and dime, David Lynch, David Lynch.

Before you dismiss me as a certifiable lunatic, why not take the Kinkade Rorschach test yourself and see what you come up with when you project your imagination onto kinky Kinkadeville? Are there decomposing bodies buried under those luscious peonies and dew-drenched lupins? Don’t be stupid, of course there are!

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