THOMAS KINKADE’S AMERICAN DREAM

by Ted Kreiter

We’re on the phone with mega-artist Thomas Kinkade, whose tranquil scenes of village streets and buildings glowing with light have delighted millions of Americans. It’s 10:00 a.m., and the artist is in his studio, a 60-foot walk from his home outside San Jose, California. Kinkade goes there faithfully every morning before breakfast and often stays until dinnertime and sometimes after, six days a week.

“When I’m working on a painting, I get passionately obsessed with it,” the 44-year-old artist says. “Right now I’m working on a painting called The Bridge of Hope. It’s a follow-up to a painting I did called The Bridge of Faith.”

Bridges are a favorite subject of the artist, as are steps or grassy inclines leading upward or through a gate–images that are symbols of his religious faith. Some of his paintings actually are visual depictions of Bible verses, such as his A Light in the Storm, taken from John 8:12: “I am the light of the world.”

Many of his other works are not overtly religious, but whatever their subject matter, in any Kinkade painting, there is bound to be something more than first meets the eye. Those who look closely, for example, may be able to make out the initial N for Kinkade’s childhood sweetheart and wife, Nannette, which he works into all his paintings. His Golden Gate Bridge reportedly contains 156 Ns, which may be a record. What often goes unnoticed in Kinkade’s paintings, except by the very observant, is the artist’s playfulness, which he expresses by slipping in tiny details here and there. The initials on the tree in his Homestead House, for example, stand for Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. In his Paris, City of Lights, Kinkade is having a showing at the Louvre in Paris (something which in reality has not yet happened), but he has painted in a banner saying the exhibit is “sold out.”

Another humorous interloper into Kinkade paintings is America’s most beloved illustrator, Norman Rockwell. In one of the artist’s works, you can barely make out the famous illustrator’s big round glasses peering out from the windshield of an old car driving down Main Street toward the viewer. In another, Rockwell is seen at the corner of the painting hurrying up a walk toward a brightly glowing house.

“I think Norman Rockwell was my earliest hero,” Kinkade relates. “I was an artist since I was a baby. I remember my mom had a big collection of copies of [Saturday Evening Post] magazines, and that was really my introduction to those great illustrators. Not just Norman Rockwell, but Stephan Dohanos, John Falter, John Clymer, and others.” He recalls being amazed at his first sight of a collection of Rockwell paintings. “I just sat in rapture, mainly because I didn’t know how it was possible to paint things that realistic,” he says. “I hadn’t seen artwork that could capture a sense of visual reality in that compelling way.”

“I had seen so much art in the museums–still-life paintings and landscapes, and so forth–but that was very mannered compared to this,” he continues. “This was very compelling, very believable.”

As his interest in his own art grew, Kinkade says he was drawn to Rockwell for yet another reason: “his attitude of creating an art of meaning for people. I share something in common with Norman Rockwell and, for that matter, with Walt Disney,” he says. “in that I really like to make people happy.”

Another thing the two artists share is their compulsion when away from painting to get back to it as soon as possible. Rockwell was legendary for finding excuses to head out to his studio even on Christmas morning, Kinkade says. “That’s a challenge for me, too,” he adds, and admits that even while he is talking to us, he is working away on his painting. “When I have an interview such as our time today, I have headsets and I talk as I work,” he says. “I’m putting in some flowers right now as we speak.”

It soon becomes clear that while Kinkade has a passion for painting, his passion for talking is almost as great. He has a lot to say, about art–about everything–and if he were not so busy painting, traveling, lecturing, volunteering, and being a father to his four young daughters, he could probably be an outstanding full-time teacher as well. He’s also an avid reader with a collection of several thousand volumes in his library, but what he collects with the most gusto is art.

“Artists dream of growing up and making some money so that they can buy art,” he says. Fortunately, Kinkade’s artwork has made him financially very wealthy. “I don’t have yachts and airplanes and all that, but I have a bunch of paintings,” he says. “I have probably 200 paintings in my collection. My goal is to endow this collection to my hometown community someday so there could be beautiful art for people there.”

One painting that he is most proud of is his original oil of a 1934 Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. “It is a painting of a little boy clinging to a weather vane, and he’s looking out to sea,” Kinkade says. “It’s a beautiful painting. In fact, it’s one of the few paintings Rockwell mentioned in his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator. In chapter 10 or 11, I think it is, he starts out by saying that most of the stuff he painted in the 20s and 30s was pretty corny, like little boys hanging off a weather vane looking out to sea. When I read that, I said, ‘Hey, that’s my painting!’”

Kinkade is adamant that paintings should not be owned solely by museums or hang only in the homes of wealthy people. He believes firmly that everyone should have a beautiful painting. “You know,” he says, “it goes into a home; it is on the wall forever; it is part of the culture of the home. And in fact, it gets passed down generation after generation. It becomes part of the family heritage. It’s a powerful thing.” And Rockwell’s art, which at one time was looked down on simply as illustration, now belongs in that category of art that lasts.

“I mean, you go to that Norman Rockwell museum and walk around all those paintings up there in Stockbridge, and you know, this is a timeless part of our heritage,” Kinkade says. “Those images have meaning long beyond the painter’s lifetime. That’s what gets me excited about art.”

Kinkade travels the world to find the materials that end up in his own paintings. The cozy cottages he is so famous for really do exist. He lifts them from places such as England’s lovely Cotswolds and the Austrian Alps. Some have been the homes of famous people, such as the English cottage once owned by Beatrix Potter. In the U.S. he has borrowed The Pine Inn in Carmel, California; various buildings in New Orleans; and picturesque places on Fisherman’s Wharf for some of his paintings.

While he was painting in New England some time back, Kinkade came upon Norman Rockwell’s original studio. Not his last one in Massachusetts, but his earlier one in West Arlington, Vermont, the artist explains. “West Arlington is a little hamlet, really nothing more than a church and a covered bridge, and that’s about it,” Kinkade says. “But the Arlington studio is just full of memories. That is where he painted the Four Freedoms and, of course, most of his Post covers.” The Rockwell home is now a bed-and-breakfast inn. Kinkade knocked on the door and asked the lady who now owns the property in Vermont’s Green Mountains if he might paint in the old studio that had not been occupied since Rockwell left. She’d heard of Thomas Kinkade, of course, and she said yes.

Six months later, the artist returned to paint in the studio. For Kinkade, who never got to meet his idol Rockwell in person, it was a thrill. “It was just like I was living this little slice of this life that I had read about since I was a little boy,” he says. “It was an amazing time.”

One key to Thomas Kinkade’s art is that he grew up in the kind of small town made legendary in Rockwell paintings. His rise from poverty and obscurity is a latter-day illustration in full color of the American Dream. As Kinkade has said, “Art saved my life.”

“Placerville is the town I grew up in the Sierra foothills, not too far from Lake Tahoe in the High Sierras,” he says. “It was a simpler life when I grew up. The town was isolated. We lived on a little rural country lane that was unpaved.”

Thomas’ parents divorced when he was about five. “I was the only kid from a divorced home in that whole community that I knew of,” he says. “Everyone had a mom and dad, and I’d go to baseball practice and there’d be no dad there. It’s a very common thing now, but at that time it was a cause of embarrassment and shame.” He also was very poor. But he had something the other kids didn’t: his art.

“I was always the kid who could draw,” he says. “I had this talent, and it was the one thing that gave me some kind of dignity in the midst of my personal environment, because growing up, I was very impoverished.”

What Kinkade did not realize until long afterward was that the small-town atmosphere he grew up in would become the great calling card of his artistic future. “Saturday was the day the townspeople would show up on Main Street and do their shopping,” he recalls. “You’d bump into your neighbors, I’d get a haircut at Pete’s Barber Shop. I’d have a bag of popcorn from the Ben Franklin five and dime. The kids would hang out at the bell tower, hooting and whistling at each other and watching the other kids who were older cruise up and down in their hot rods and jalopies.” Some of those old cars have made their way into classic Kinkade paintings such as his Hometown Evening, which features a 1932 Ford Coupe among other vintage vehicles.

But Kinkade wasn’t always a fan of small towns or accessible art. As a young man, he longed to get away to the big city. At age 18 he headed to the University of California, Berkeley, on a scholarship. There he immersed himself in the diversity of ideas. “I thought my art would reflect my need to explore more sophisticated ideas, a philosophy that would be more of, you might say, an intellectual aspect of creative expression. But in fact, the reverse happened,” he says. “My college professor at the University of California pontificated one afternoon about the artist being an icon, an island, who had to be detached from the culture,” he recalls. “He would say, ‘Your art is all about you. It doesn’t matter if they understand it. It doesn’t matter if they have any interest in it. It’s all about you.’ That just grated on my sensibilities.”

Later, while studying at art school in Pasadena, Kinkade finally rejected the “pseudo-sophistication” he had learned at college and decided that the modernist art he had become enamored with was not really for him. He wanted his art to appeal to everybody, not just art critics.

Now his paintings reflect what he believes are the “foundational values.” “I try to create images of inspiration, hope, a simpler way of life,” he says. “Messages that linger in the mind and remind you that the world is not all the ugliness you see on the 10:00 news–that there is good news and good stories about good people that are more compelling than that bad news you see on CNN.”

Today, as Kinkade puts it, “some 10 million people wake up every day to one of my paintings.” Not only does it put them in a better frame of mind, it enables the artist to reach a huge audience of Kinkade fans for the sake of his many charities.

Hummus and Cucumber Appetizer Bites

Recipe Yields 10-14 Appetizer Bites

Ingredients

• 1 Large Cucumber
• 1 Cup Hummus (Kalyn uses purchased hummus, but we recommend Madge’s Hummus.)
• Black or White Sesame Seeds

You will also need one small Ziploc bag or other thick plastic bag with one corner cut off.

Directions

1. If you are using European-style cucumbers (as Kalyn does), peel them in strips to leave some green color on. Otherwise, you should peel the skin off of regular grocery-store cucumbers.

2. Cut the cucumber into slices around 3/4 inch to 1 inch thick.

3. Put the hummus into a small Ziploc bag and cut off the corner. Use this like a pastry bag and squeeze it onto the top of each cucumber slice, just enough to slightly mound up but not so much that it starts to droop over.

4. Sprinkle the Hummus and Cucumber Bites with sesame seeds and serve.

You can find Kalyn’s Kitchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Blueberry Oatmeal Breakfast Cake

(Makes 8 servings)

Ingredients

• 1-1⁄3 cups flour
• ¾ cup quick-cooking oats
• 1⁄3 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoons salt
• ¾ cup milk
• ¼ cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 cup frozen blueberries*

Directions

Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease an 8-inch round baking pan. Set aside.
In medium mixing bowl combine flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
In a 1-cup measure stir milk, oil, and egg. Pour all at once into flour mixture. Stir just until moistened (batter will be lumpy). Fold in blueberries. Spoon batter into prepared pan. Bake until cake is golden and pulls away from sides of pan 20 to 25 minutes.
Cool on a rack, 5 to 10 minutes.
Serve warm.
*Blueberries should be firmly frozen when used in baking.

Salmon and Blueberry Salad with Red Onion Vinaigrette

(Makes 4 servings)

Ingredients

• 1 medium-sized red onion, thinly sliced in half rings
• 1/4 cup Regina red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt, divided
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper, divided
• 3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 1-1/2 pounds salmon fillet, cut crosswise in 4 portions
• 6 cups lettuce leaves in bite-sized pieces
• 1cup fresh blueberries

Directions

In microwaveable cup, combine onion, red wine vinegar, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/8 teaspoon of pepper; cover loosely with plastic wrap; microwave on high power for 1 minute. Let stand, stirring occasionally, until onions turn pink, about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat grill or broiler. Brush 1 tablespoon of olive oil on both sides of salmon fillets; sprinkle with remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Grill or broil salmon, skin side down, until just cooked through, about 6 minutes. Divide lettuce leaves among 4 dinner plates; place salmon in the center. With slotted spoon, remove onions from vinegar; scatter onions, along with blueberries, over and around the fish. Whisk remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil into vinegar mixture; drizzle vinaigrette over salmon.

Berry Blue Smoothie

(Makes 3 servings)

Ingredients

• 2 cups fresh or slightly thawed frozen blueberries
• 1 6-ounce container low-fat vanilla or other flavored yogurt
• 1 cup fruit juice, such as orange, pineapple or apple
• 1 tablespoon honey or sugar, more or less to taste

Directions

In the container of an electric blender, place blueberries, yogurt, juice, and honey. Whirl until smooth. Serve immediately.
 
 

Blueberry-Topped Rice Cakes

(Makes 4 servings)

Ingredients

• ½ cup ricotta or cottage cheese
• 2 teaspoons apricot preserves
• 4 apple-cinnamon flavored rice cakes
• 1 cup thinly-sliced fresh fruit (such as apple, pear, nectarine or peach)
• 1 cup fresh blueberries

Directions

In a small bowl, stir together ricotta and preserves.
Spoon an equal amount on each of the rice cakes almost to the edge.
Arrange fruit slices in circles, on top of the ricotta mixture.
Top each with ¼ cup of the blueberries.
Serve immediately.

Blueberry Shrimp Salad with Lemon Vinaigrette

(Makes 4 servings)

Ingredients

• Medium-size shrimp, boiled or grilled: ¾ pound (about 20)
• Fresh blueberries: 1 cup
• Walnut pieces, toasted: ½ cup
• Edamame or green peas, cooked: ½ cup
• Mixed salad greens: 5 ounces (about 4 cups)
• Lemon Vinaigrette: (recipe follows)
• Firm white cheese, such as feta, crumbled: 2 ounces (about ½ cup)

Directions

In a large salad bowl, toss shrimp, blueberries, walnut pieces, edamame (or peas), and salad greens
Evenly divide salad onto six plates. Drizzle with Lemon Vinaigrette (below). Sprinkle cheese around edges of salads
Lemon Vinaigrette
In a small mixing bowl, whisk ¼ cup vegetable oil, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, ½ teaspoon sugar, 1⁄8 teaspoon salt and 1⁄8 teaspoon pepper.

Honey Almond Biscotti

Servings: 36 cookies
Prep Time: 25 minutes

Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter or margarine, softened
• 3/4 cup clover honey
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons of aniseeds
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 cup dried cranberries
• 3/4 cup dried slivered almonds

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Using electric mixture, beat butter until light; gradually add honey, eggs, and vanilla, beating until smooth. In a small bowl, combine flour, anise seeds, cinnamon, baking powder, salt, and baking soda; gradually add to honey mixture, mixing well. Stir in cranberries and almonds.

Shape dough into two 10x3x1- inch logs on greased baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes or until light golden brown. Remove from oven to a wire rack, and cool 5 minutes. Reduce oven to 300 degrees. Transfer logs to
cutting board. Cut each log into 1/2-inch slices; arrange pieces on baking sheet. Bake 20 minutes or until crisp. Cool on wire racks.

Excerpted with permission from Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper by C. Marina Marchese, published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009.

Frankies Spuntino Tomato Sauce

(Makes about 3 quarts)

Ingredients
• 1 cup olive oil
• 13 cloves garlic
• One 96-ounce can (1 kg.) or four 28-ounce cans Italian tomatoes
• Large pinch red pepper flakes
• 2 teaspoons fine sea salt

Directions

1. Combine olive oil and garlic in large deep saucepan and cook over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring or swirling occasionally, until garlic is deeply colored—striations of deep brown running through golden cloves—and fragrant. If garlic starts to smell acrid or sharp or is taking on color quickly, pull pan off stove and reduce heat.

2. While garlic is getting golden, deal with tomatoes: Pour them into bowl and crush them with your hands. We like to pull out the firmer stem end from each of the tomatoes as we crush them and discard those along with the basil leaves that are packed into the can.

3. When garlic is just about done, add red pepper flakes to the oil and cook them for 30 seconds or a minute, to infuse their flavor and spice into the oil. Dump in the tomatoes, add the salt, and stir well. Turn the heat up to medium, get the sauce simmering at a gentle pace, not aggressively, and simmer for 4 hours. Stir it from time to time. Mother it a little bit.

4. Check the sauce for salt at the end. The sauce can be cooked with meat at this point, or stored, covered, in the fridge for at least 4 days or frozen for up to a few months.

Meatballs

(Makes 6 servings—18 to 20 meatballs)

Ingredients
• 4 slices bread (2 packed cups’ worth)
• 2 pounds ground beef
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• ¼ cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
• ¼ cup grated Pecorino Romano, plus about 1 cup for serving
• ¼ cup raisins
• ¼ cup pine nuts
• 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt
• 15 turns white pepper
• 4 large eggs
• ½ cup dried bread crumbs
• Frankies Spuntino Tomato Sauce (from above)

Directions

1. Heat oven to 325°F. Put fresh bread in bowl, cover it with water, and let it soak for a minute or so. Pour off water and wring out bread, then crumble and tear it into tiny pieces.

2. Combine bread with remaining ingredients except tomato sauce in medium mixing bowl, adding them in the order listed. Add dried breadcrumbs last to adjust for wetness: mixture should be moist wet, not sloppy wet.

3. Shape meat mixture into handball-sized meatballs and space them evenly on baking sheet. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Meatballs will be firm but still juicy and gently yielding when they’re cooked through. (At this point, you can cool meatballs and hold them in refrigerator for as long as a couple of days or freeze them for future.)

4. Meanwhile, heat tomato sauce in sauté pan large enough to accommodate the meatballs comfortably.

5. Dump meatballs into pan of sauce and nudge heat up ever so slightly. Simmer meatballs for half an hour or so (this isn’t one of those cases where longer is better) so they can soak up some sauce. Keep them there until it’s time to eat.

Pork Braciola Marinara

(Makes 6 servings)

Ingredients:
• Six ½-inch-thick boneless pork shoulder steaks (8 ounces each)
• Fine sea salt and freshly ground white pepper
• 1 clove, garlic, minced
• ⅔ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
• 1 cup grated aged provolone
• 1 cup freshly grated Parmesan, plus more for serving
• Frankies Spuntino Tomato Sauce

Directions

1. Butterfly pork: With palm of one hand firmly steadying a cutlet on cutting board, and with your knife blade parallel to meat, slice almost all way through meat, leaving last ¼-inch uncut.

2. Open up cutlet like a book, season it with salt and white pepper, and set it aside. Repeat with remaining pieces of pork.

3. Sprinkle cut side of one cutlet with a tiny pinch of minced garlic, a couple of pinches of parsley, and a generous tablespoon of each cheese.

4. Roll cutlet into tight log and set aside, seam side down.

5. Tie braciola. The simplest way is to use 2 or 3 short lengths of butcher’s twine for each roll and tie them around meat to hold it together. If you’re a master of more professional ways of tying—like a real butcher’s tie—go for it. But the braciola doesn’t (or shouldn’t) get roughed up too much during the cooking process, so it doesn’t need to be in a straitjacket or anything.

6. Bring tomato sauce to a steady, gentle simmer in large pot.

7. Nestle braciola into pot of tomato sauce. Simmer for 3 hours, or until tender; you should be able to easily pull away a strand or two of meat with tug of fork.

8. To serve, remove braciola from sauce and snip off the twine. Arrange, whole or sliced, on a platter with generous blanket of sauce. Transfer remaining sauce to serving bowl. Serve hot or at room temperature. Garnish with grated Pecorino Romano and serve. Use leftover tomato sauce from the braciola in any recipe that calls for tomato sauce.