Painter of Light cast in Dark Shadow

Thomas Kinkade is famous for his luminous landscapes and street scenes, those dreamy, deliberately inspirational images he says have brought “God’s light” into people’s lives, even as they have made him one of America’s most collected artists.

A devout Christian who trademarked himself as the “Painter of Light,” Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush and his life for 20 years. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” he said in a 2004 video biography.

But some former employees, gallery operators and others contend the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side.

In litigation and interviews, some former gallery owners depict Kinkade, 48, as a ruthless businessman who drove them to financial ruin as he fattened business associates’ bank accounts and feathered his nest with tens of millions of dollars.

Kinkade whose solely owned Thomas Kinkade Co. is based in Morgan Hill denies these allegations.

Last month, however, 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. That decision marks the first major legal setback for Kinkade, who won three previous arbitration claims. Five more are pending.

But it’s not just Kinkade’s business practices that have been questioned. Former gallery owners, employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he’s built his empire.

Around Stanislaus County, most gallery owners would not talk about Kinkade on the record, many of them saying they had only negative comments about his business practices.

A gallery owner in Turlock said she used to carry Kinkade paintings, but stopped after the business relationship suffered. She called him a talented artist who was too eager to chase money, and a terror to deal with businesswise.

In sworn testimony and interviews, ex-employees and other gallery owners recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled entertainers, cursed a woman who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman’s breasts at a party.

And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he calls it, which allegedly manifesteditself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. He urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.

Kinkade declined a request for an interview. But in response to written questions, he labeled those accounts of his behavior as “ridiculous” and “crazy allegations.”

The artist and his lawyer, Dana Levitt, contend that Sheppard, a key witness in the arbitration cases against Kinkade and his company, is a disgruntled employee, noting that he lost a wrongful termination claim against the artist’s charitable foundations in 2004. They also deny the dealers’ allegations, which they say are lawyer driven and “uncoupled from reality.”

Kinkade, a self described product of a broken home and difficult childhood, once worked as a film animator and hawked his paintings in parking lots in his hometown, Placerville. His climb to fame began two decades ago, when he and his wife spent their life savings to start making his prints. Since then, Kinkade has spun a lucrative career from his romantic images of street scenes, lighthouses, country cottages and landscapes. It is a world without sharp edges, aglow with setting suns, streetlights and luminescent windows.

Kitsch or simply mainstream?

Critics have described Kinkade’s works as little more than mass produced kitsch. But that has not deterred the multitudes who pay a few hundred dollars for paper prints or $10,000 or more for signed canvas editions.

“It’s mainstream art, not art you have to … have an art degree to know whether it’s good or not,” said Mike Koligman, who with his wife owns Kinkade galleries in San Diego and Utah.

Dwayne Overholtzer, owner of Santa Fe Trails Art Gallery in Riverbank, said he also admires Kinkade’s paintings.

“I think his work is just awesome,” he said, adding that he’s considered becoming a local distributor for his work. But he’s heard detractors, too. “Some people say he’s almost getting too commercialized,” Overholtzer said.

Kinkade’s art is both a personal passion and a business for Los Angeles resident Karen de la Carriere. She deals in the resale market for Kinkades, selling more than $25,000 of his works each month on eBay and her Web site.

“This is God given talent,” she said. “He is a modern day Leonardo da Vinci or Monet. There is no one in our generation who can paint like that.”

Nor many who make the money he does. From 1997 through May 2005, Kinkade reaped more than $50 million in royalties from prints and licensed product lines, according to testimony in the recently decided arbitration case.

As he built his brand, Kinkade came to embody its underlying themes of faith, family and life’s blessings.

Kinkade’s supporters say he is genial and genuine. He has raised millions for charities including The Salvation Army and Make A Wish Foundation.

Manipulating dealers’ faith

But a far more selfish portrait of the artist emerges from legal action brought by former gallery owners against Kinkade, Media Arts Group Inc. the public company he has since taken private and some who helped build it into a $250 million a year juggernaut before sales flagged and its stock tanked.

Ex-dealers claim Kinkade manipulated their faith to induce them to invest in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, independently owned stores licensed to deal exclusively in his work. They contend he sought to devalue the company before buying it back two years ago for $32.7 million, renaming it Thomas Kinkade Co.
Company executives and lawyers contend that a steep drop in the number of Signature galleries is a result of a broad decline in the limited edition art business.

But such arguments failed to persuade the arbitration panel, which on Feb. 23 ruled in favor of the former Virginia gallery owners, Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello. The panel found that the company and one of its executives, Richard F. Barnett, defrauded the couple by withholding pertinent information that would have kept them from investing $122,000 to open a gallery in
1999. The interim award of $860,000, based on a decision that Kinkade’s lawyer said he would seek to void, could quadruple when interest, legal fees and other costs are added, said the former dealers’ lawyer, Norman Yatooma, whose Michigan based firm is also handling the five pending arbitration claims.

While the panel did not single out the artist in its fraud finding, it wrote that he and other Media Arts Group executives created a “religious environment designed to instill a special relationship of trust” with the couple, now divorced. The company, communicating through KinÅ|kade and the others, often used terms such as “partner,” “trust,” “Christian” and “God” to convey a sense of “higher calling,” the panel wrote.

Kinkade has said he does not market specifically to Christians. But his limited edition canvas prints bear the Christian fish symbol and a biblical reference, “John 3:16.” “I love to talk about my faith,” he said in a deposition. “I try to embrace people with love, unconditional love,
like Christ did.”

Former dealer Jim Cote said he was hard pressed to feel the love. He filed an arbitration claim, alleging among other things that he was a victim of Media Arts Group’s pressure to oversaturate the market.

“In the beginning it was fine,” said Cote, of Birmingham, Mich., who opened his first Signature gallery in 1996. “Sales were great because Thom at that point was very popular and there were limited outlets to buy his
art.” But, Cote claims, Media Arts Group pushed him to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own outlets in his territory. Cote eventually had three stores, all of which failed.

Cote says his net worth of more than $3 million has been erased.

Gone are his marriage, his house and most of his possessions. He doesn’t blame his divorce entirely on his galleries’ failure, he said, but “it certainly didn’t help.” He shut his last store in December and has filed for
bankruptcy protection.

Kinkade’s lawyers deny Cote’s allegations.

As Hazlewood, Spinello, Cote and other Signature gallery owners were faltering, the company’s stock plummeted from a high of nearly $25 a share to less than $3. Former dealers claim Kinkade let them sink in order to drive down the stock price, so he could buy back the company cheap a charge the artist and his lawyer said was absurd.

Kinkade cofounded the company as Lightpost Publishing in 1989 and took it public in 1994. He bought it back in 2004 for $4 a share. Investors who put their faith and fortunes in the Painter of Light were left holding
a mostly empty bag. But even as the company ran aground, Kinkade and others in top positions prospered, according to testimony.

From 1997 through May 2005, Kinkade earned $53 million for his work, the company’s assistant controller testified. Barnett, then head of retail sales and now an executive vice president, also made millions as the Signature galleries were failing. Unknown to the dealers, he reaped commissions on all art sold to them at wholesale, averaging more than $2 million a year for 1999, 2000 and 2001, according to testimony.

The arbitration panel found that the company and Barnett, who ran a training program for prospective gallery owners, “painted an unrealistic and misleading picture of the prospects for success” and never warned potential investors of the risks.

Allegations of bad behavior

The litigation also delved into his personal conduct, which witnesses testified was often at odds with the image he projected.

In testimony and interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Sheppard and other former employees said they often went with Kinkade to strip clubs and bars, where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control.

John Dandois, Media Arts Group’s senior director of retail operations from 1995 to 1999, testified in a hearing that about six years ago the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas that people seated nearby moved away from him. At other times, Kinkade could be downright nasty, Dandois testified, recalling an incident in which Dandois’ wife tried to help the allegedly inebriated artist to his feet in a bar. Kinkade “flipped her the bird and told her, you know, just to ‘F you’ several times,” Dandois testified.

In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s. Sheppard said he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking.

“Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to ‘mark his territory,’ ” Sheppard told the Times.

In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he “grew up in the country” where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said, “There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don’t recall it.”

In response to the Times’ written questions, Kinkade did not address any specific incident.

“It does disappoint me when people I have tried to help and befriend make crazy allegations about me,” he said. “I am a big fan of imagination, but the specific allegations you have described to me are ridiculous and I feel like the victim of a legal stalker.”