I first become aware of Thomas Kinkade’s work as a high school student putting puzzles together of light and happy English villages with bridges running down the middle of the painting. I thought at the time that these paintings were very old (they were not), possibly even impressionistic works, and that Thomas Kinkade was a deceased painter whose works had become popular for some reasons unbeknownst to me. As it happened he was alive at the time, and his works were not old at all.

But his works did appear very old. And this was a conscious decision on his part. Having done some reading on him, he had a definite philosophy concerning art. He deliberately rejected the alienation and isolation of modern art, and consciously sought to be part of a community (and that included a business community–the puzzles I put together as a teenager were part of a sizable business empire that commodified his art for personal profit). Our world as a general rule is alienated from God, from the world we live in, and from each other. The alienation that artists (whether painters or musicians or writers) show in our works is something that we first feel inside of us, and something that resonates with many other people.

But Kinkade’s work resonated with a lot of other people too. They are relentlessly sunny works, full of bright colors and beauty. They are backwards looking, an act of nostalgia for an imagined past that was never quite as sunny or attractive as the works made today. And yet those deliberately reactionary works were greatly appealing to many people who themselves possessed the same nostalgia for an imagined past, a past stripped of all injustice and barbarism and full of the civility and respect and beauty that we find so impoverished in our own existence. Thomas Kinkade’s vision was appealing to a large group of people who shared his dislike of the alienated modern world, where everyone’s sense of place was disrupted, where there seemed to room for old fashioned ideals or for a sense of settled place or a worth for people outside of net worth.

And yet there was an irony in this, that Thomas Kinkade’s works were very financially lucrative, in stark contrast to most artists. Kinkade once (or more than once, perhaps) compared himself to Walt Disney, and the comparison is apt. Both were men whose retrograde social vision seemed to make them prophets of an aristocratic vision of an imagined past that was cleaned of all unacceptable elements, anti-capitalistic works that nonetheless proved generally profitable for themselves because so many others were willing to go along with their vision, earning their money through grubby capitalism and then trading part of their wealth to own those estates Kinkade painted, to make themselves appear to be older wealth than they actually were. It’s the same vision that Disney still paints in their urban architecture, an act as deliberately and falsely nostalgic as Kinkade’s paintings.

This is not to say anything bad about the man, whom I did not know. The fault is not that Thomas Kinkade became a wealthy painter of sentimental works, but rather that we ourselves became a market for such works through our desire to escape both the unpleasant reality of our times as well as forget the unpleasant realities of the past. There has never been any golden age in human history. So long as fallible human beings run the show, there never will be. This is not a pleasant truth to express, and it does not make painters a great deal of money unless they are cutting edge types whose work serves to increase the moral decay of our decadent civilization. Between the deliberate reactionaries and the flamboyant revolutionaries there is a great gulf of people in the middle who have to find ways of coming to terms with our world, whether we wish to survive in it or whether we wish to do what we can to keep it from destroying itself. Neither of those strategies seems to be make one’s art greatly popular. It is far more comforting to be on one extreme or the other, with great confidence in one’s vision of a glorious past to which we must return or a glorious future that we will yet attain. For those of us who lack such confidence in the schemes of mankind either to restore a better past or build a better future, it is a struggle to find a compelling vision to present to those who are dissatisfied with any options that exist.

And that is where Kinkade succeeded most of all. Few of his many customers (and my family can be counted among them) probably cared one bit that the past that Kinkade drew, whether it was biblical scenes or those old-timey country villages were imagined fictions of his own mind. What mattered to them was that the vision was appealing and convincing. If they were deceived, it was not because Kinkade was a dishonorable trickster but because they wanted to believe the past was less messy and complicated than it was. We always want to think of our past or our future as straightforward and manageable, because it seems intolerable for our lives and existence to always remain messy and complicated and uncertain. But so they are. The price of free will is complication and messiness. If we are dissatisfied with the reality behind the works of Thomas Kinkade and his shared vision with many others of an idyllic past, we ought to look more closely at ourselves. We make our own vision of the past out of what we are just as surely as our past shapes us. Thomas Kinkade is no longer alive, but his vision of an imagined past still lives on, and may turn darker in our present world instead of reflecting the light that made his own works so pleasant and radiant.