The God Fraud of Thomas Kinkade
Did a painter really think he was a prophet?
He was a painter who rose to superstardom in the 1990s by saying he was a prophet of God. In 2012, he died in a haze of booze and Valium.
Evangelical Christianity made him a star, then tried to forget him. I’m trying to to understand the disturbing life of Thomas Kinkade.
There aren’t many sources for his life.
In 2013, his company had in-house documentary, An American Artist, released on YouTube. It’s a portrait of a Christian “family man,” bizarrely censorious of well-known details—the drugs, the girlfriends, etc.
In 2014, a sort-of biography, Billion Dollar Painter by Eric Kuskey, describes years working for Kinkade. Kuskey recalls Kinkade speaking of growing up poor in California in a “rundown singlewide in a dilapidated trailer park on the outskirts of town…”
To compare these sources, a third story emerges. The documentary had a photo of Kinkade’s childhood home. It’s a house. Kinkade had lied. Hardly an unusual event.
His mother brought up her kids Evangelical. Kinkade had no interest. He went to Berkeley University, then to an art school in…
