CHAPTER 1 
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Wallace Road forks off into the green meadows that roll down from Golden Chain Highway, on the northern outskirts of Placerville, California. This is where the blue blossoms and redbud trees grow, and the elderberry bushes buttress the unfenced road. Where deerweed and yarrow and fescue sprout in knee-high pasture patches, and sunlight bathes the leas and creeks and rivers that trickle and run through El Dorado County.
This is the landscape of Thomas Kinkade, the mountain paradise where he painted in his first studio tucked into a curve on Wallace Road, only miles from where he grew up in a trailer home. This is the duality of the paradise of Thomas Kinkade’s childhood that formed him as a man; where “imaginary” was the only form of dinner he often had to eat. In his mind, the rundown singlewide in a dilapidated trailer park on the outskirts of town became an idyllic countryside home.
In reality, Mary Ann Kinkade was working three jobs and barely getting by when she moved her three children—Katherine, Thomas, and Patrick—to the trailer after Thom’s father, William “Bill” Thomas Kinkade Jr., had walked out on them. The destitute trailer park on the outside of town, with its unkempt surroundings, became, in Thom’s retelling, a happy home surrounded by a paradise of lush woods and moss-covered rocks, with fond memories of Tom Sawyerish days fishing in a nearby pond.
Born William Thomas Kinkade III on January 19, 1958, in Sacramento, California, Thom barely knew his World War II veteran father. In those early years, Bill Kinkade was bouncing from job to job, one of them at McClellan Air Force Base. Bill frequently came home drunk, if he came home at all. When Thom was barely six years old, Bill abandoned his family (it was his second marriage), and Mary Ann was left with nothing but a Nevada divorce. Destitute, the family was forced to leave Sacramento proper to seek an affordable living situation in an outlying area of the city, and Placerville became the rescuing haven that took the family in.
The landscape surrounding Placerville created the idyllic childhood setting that formed Thom’s vision of the world for the rest of his life. The natural beauty of the countryside, the wide-open fields and majestic mountains, developed Thom’s sensibility in a way that no city could have. He and his brother played cowboys and Indians, chased each other in tag, and wrestled until the red-gold sunset darkened the El Dorado peaks and ebbed the light over the Sacramento Valley. On rainy days, Thom lined up his crayons and pencils on the coffee table in the living room and played “studio” while his brother was the assistant, handing him his colors. Even then, Thom drew all that he knew: the hills, the flowers, the dales. At night the family spent time together playing board games, checkers and backgammon, and on Sundays they went to church.
Thomas Kinkade always found the beauty in things. I believe that he had to, in order to escape the difficulties of a fatherless childhood spent in penury. In his mind and in his art, the ordinary became extraordinary. As many trailer parks tend to belie their humble status by calling themselves “manors” and “estates” and “villas,” so Thomas Kinkade had a way of making bad things seem good, and good things seem better.
Understandable for a man who as a little boy spent his evenings waiting for his mother to come home, hoping she would be bringing food that night. He used to sit in the little window of the trailer and look out through the lacy curtains his mother had sewn. If she was carrying a brown paper bag in her arms, it meant they would get to eat that night. If she didn’t have a bag, they would have to go to bed hungry. He felt so excited when he saw her walking toward the trailer with that bag in her arms, it was like Christmas every time. He swore that when he grew up he would never go hungry again.
He never blamed his mother for their hard life. He knew she did what she could. She was all alone raising three kids with no help; her family was far away. Working three jobs, she was hardly home. Sometimes she fell asleep at the dinner table, she was so tired. All the kids worked to help out and bring in money. Thom had a paper route from the time he was twelve years old, and brought home every nickel to his mother. The memory of the scarcity of his childhood never left him; for the rest of his life, going hungry was something Thom feared.
Ironically, the Kinkades lived in California’s El Dorado County, a region known for its natural mineral wealth. Nestled in the rugged foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Placerville was the heart of the gold rush in the 1840s, where only ten miles from its town center, John Sutter found gold flakes running through his sawmill. Placerville was named for the placer deposits of the alluvial sands of gold in the riverbed of the Spanish Ravine, which ran through what is now the center of town. Along with the gold rush came the fortune seekers, and with them the villains and crooks for whom Placerville became known as “hangtown.” As the county seat, Placerville housed the courthouse. Many a thirty-minute trial ended with a ne’er-do-well dangling at the end of a rope from the hanging tree at the center of town.
The legends and lore of El Dorado, the history and its attending nostalgia, deeply affected and influenced Thom in those early years. Mentally escaping to another time was often the only means to relieve the mundane reality of his present moment. And he could escape most effectively and profoundly by drawing; specifically, drawing nature. He had nothing else; his life revolved around school and nature. Nature was in his blood from an early age, and the fantasy of those idyllic days gone by became part of his DNA. It was his most passionate subject for his entire life.
Thom loved to draw, and his mother claimed he could draw before he could walk. Drawing made him stand out, gain attention and approval, and was a means of escape. He told me how his skill became a tool for survival. He used to draw caricatures in school. There was a teacher that everyone hated, and kids paid Thom to draw a funny picture of him. Thom started selling caricatures of all the teachers the kids didn’t like, and it was the first time he understood that he could make money doing what he loved to do. It was his first glimpse that art could be a way out of poverty. After that, he was known as “the kid who can draw.”
When Thom was eleven years old, a local painter by the name of Charles Bell took him on as an apprentice and showed him the first basic techniques Thom needed to master in order to become the painter he wanted to be. He sold his first landscape painting that year, for $7.50.
The idealized visions of Placerville from Thom’s memory became the key inspiration that fueled his paintings until he died. The babbling brooks, the wooded groves, the cottages—not trailers—in the forested glens, the warmly lit homes—not the singlewide without electricity—exemplified the transforming imagination he brought to the world, to escape a childhood touched by significant disappointments and difficulties. But the Thomas Kinkade I knew always had an ebullient spirit; a remarkable sanguine disposition that sought to do good, feel good, and see only the good.
Thomas Kinkade eventually would leave Placerville, but the humility and simplicity of life there never really left him. It was there that he also met the love of his life, and brought her along on his life’s journey. In 1970, while Thom was on his paper route, tossing newspapers into driveways from his bicycle, he saw a beautiful blond young girl, Nanette, standing by a moving truck that had just brought her family to town. He stopped his bike and stared. She noticed him and smiled back. Seeing Nanette was like seeing a radiating light coming from across the street. Her golden hair and her beautiful smile captured Thom’s heart. They were both twelve years old.
From the beginning, Nanette fell for the young boy with a buoyant sense of humor, a penchant for hope, and the desire to see the positive in the world. She knew who Thom really was on the inside from the very beginning, and she would always know that boy no matter what later happened in their lives. To Thom, Nanette was the beautiful vision he craved; the idea of beauty that redeemed the world. They had a sweetheart romance, walking hand in hand in Placerville, reading poetry under the sheltering oaks along the riverbanks, and writing each other secret love notes; notes they saved in all the years that followed. Best friends from the beginning, he was Tom Sawyer to her Becky Thatcher.
Nanette had traveled the globe, as far afield as the Philippines and Japan, and regaled Thom with stories of the Orient and flying through monsoons in bomber planes, during her father’s years in the military. Her stories set Thom’s imagination on fire and made him want to know the greater world outside his quaint hometown. At the same time, Nanette was transported by Thom’s imagination, his enthusiasm for everything in life, and of course his great talent. She had never known anyone with the passion and the outsized dreams of this small-town boy. To hear him tell it, it was a wonderful romance, and I saw it as the closest thing to the ideals Thom held on to for most of his life.
Nanette was a nurturer and a caretaker, and she must have sensed Thom’s need for protection from himself. Being an artist always comes with the risk of rejection, and Thom was sensitive to that more than anything else. Nanette had a calm, supportive way about her that gave him the protection he needed.
Thom’s lowly beginnings never hinted at the heights he would someday rise to. Nanette wanted to be a nurse and have a family, and they dreamed of a life together, he painting at his easel with children underfoot. She wanted to make Thom happy, and he thrived with her tacit support and acceptance. Any artist is engaged in a fundamental process of creation; turning the inner vision into an external reality. Thom had that ability in spades. It dazzled Nanette to hear him spinning his visions for her and for their future. They spent hours lying in the grass, looking up into the undefined blue sky of their future, planning for the life they would have together someday.
But they never dreamed of making millions. Nothing in Placerville could have prepared them for what was to come. Thom wanted to provide for his family, but he never thought he would own luxury properties and generate billions of dollars with his art. He just knew he wanted to be the greatest artist in the world.
In 1974, Glenn Wessels, a genuine fine art painter and a founding member of the Bay Area Figurative School, moved into the neighborhood. Glenn was in his late seventies, a widower, and had recently been in a jeep accident, with his friend Ansel Adams, that left him frail and ailing. He needed help around the house and studio, and a companion. At age sixteen, Thom gladly stepped in as a helping hand and apprentice to the artist, who in exchange provided him with his mentorship. In fact, Wessels became the father Thom never had.
Wessels was an artist of stature and substance, and Thom couldn’t have been more lucky to have him as a mentor. Wessels had been trained at Académie Colarossi in Paris, and studied with Karl Hofer in Berlin and Hans Hofmann in Munich. He was worldly and erudite, and a significant California artist. He had been an art critic for the San Francisco Fortnightly, and an art editor for the San Francisco Argonaut. Governor Edmund Brown named him California State Commissioner of fine arts. He served on the board of the San Francisco Art Institute and the Oakland Museum, among others. And he poured all of that experience into Thom.
Thom and Wessels spent hours talking in Wessels’s studio, and Thom was enthralled by the stories of his days in Paris, and his friendships with Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. Wessels told Thom that being an artist was a form of priesthood, a notion that ironically would become true in Thom’s career. Wessels’s stories of the romance of the life of the artist overtook Thom’s imagination, and he dreamed about living a life like that with Nanette someday.
Thom cared for Wessels, running errands, helping him in his house as well as with his paints in the studio. Wessels talked to Thom for hours about art and life and passion. Wessels believed that life was a banquet to be feasted on. He counseled Thom not to let social conventions hold back his curiosity about the total human experience; advice Thom heeded for the rest of his life. Most of all, Wessels made Thom believe in himself. He mentored him in landscape painting and technique. And he made him see that he could one day be an important artist.
When it came time for Thom to graduate from high school, Wessels insisted that Thom study art at the University of California at Berkeley, where Wessels had also studied and taught. In 1976, Wessels made the trip to Berkeley with Thom, to be on hand for his interview.
Thom and Nanette had to put their future plans on hold when Thom left Placerville for the first time, to commence his freshman year at the university in Berkeley. They knew they wanted to be together one day, but for now their relationship had to wait, as Thom needed to pursue his art studies.
Thom’s roommate was a young artist named James Gurney. The two bonded immediately, and Gurney became a good friend and fellow prankster, both of them sharing a boisterous sense of humor. The young men spent all their time sketching and scheming up humorous pranks. They dressed in identical workmen’s overalls with the same name tag and called each other “Jackson.” They would wear the uniforms into biker bars, sit down, and start sketching people without their permission, risking a bar brawl. They became known as the “two-headed monster”; their stunts included dive bombing into pools and pouring a shellac J on a friend’s doorstep and setting it on fire.
At Berkeley, Thom discovered the airbrush and quickly set out to make it his new tool, telling everyone he was going to blow away anyone else who had ever used it, coining the term blowawaymanship. But after dribbling over a caricature of comedian Jonathan Winters, he gave up on the instrument and focused again on painting. Two years into his studies at Berkeley, Thom decided he wasn’t the right fit for the school’s indulgently liberal environment, and decided to leave Northern California to continue his studies at the Art Center of Design in Pasadena, more than seven hours away from his hometown by car, making it even harder to see Nanette for several years.
At Art Center, the atmosphere was very competitive; Thom was challenged to continue to develop his painting skills, and to live the artist’s life, sporting a beret everywhere he went. Jim Gurney followed Thom to Pasadena and also enrolled at Art Center; the two rented apartments in a rundown complex in East Los Angeles, continuing their bohemian ways and constant pranks.
Thom painted prolific still lifes and landscapes of the hills above Pasadena. On the side he delivered pizza on his motorcycle to support himself. His conquests in the coed dorm became the stuff of legend, but he never really liked any of the girls he conquered. All he ever talked about was Nanette. By the time he had been gone from Placerville for years, she had found a new suitor: a fellow nursing student at California State University, where she was studying. But Thom still put Nanette on the highest pedestal.
One day, Thom heard that the relationship with the nursing student had soured. While riding horseback with Nanette, both she and her boyfriend were thrown from the horse, and he had fallen on top of her, breaking her leg. With new hope, Thom began wooing her again, taking frequent drives to see his “golden girl.” During that time, Thom painted a masterful “memory painting” of himself and Nanette out on a moonlit walk, in the style of Whistler’s Nocturnes, in pale blues with soft shadows, capturing the misty glow of hazy night under the moon. And he won the love of his life back.
Concentrating on his studies at Art Center, Thom found inspiration in the Hudson River School’s romanticized landscapes, and began selling his own work at galleries around Los Angeles. It was at the Art Center that Thom also began to become aware of the contradiction between maintaining the integrity of the artist’s vision and the need to earn a living, having a desire for commercial success. While Thom wanted to be successful, he also always talked about wanting to make a difference in the world with his art.
After two years at the Art Center, Thom and Jim both decided to quit their studies and make their dreams come true. They set out to travel across the country, riding train boxcars like hobos for months, and sketching everything they saw. Their collective work became a book called The Artist’s Guide to Sketching.
To fund the completion of the manuscript, they sought work in the film industry and were both hired to work on a movie, Fire and Ice, directed by Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi hired Thom, despite his lack of professional training, because he thought Thom was already a good painter. Thom negotiated the salaries and vacations for himself and Jim, and impressed Bakshi with his business acumen. Bakshi took a liking to Thom for his country boy aw-shucks posturing, which didn’t fool him much. He was immediately impressed by how much Thom already knew in his art.
Painting backdrops of fantastical landscapes, over seven hundred in all, Thom connected with the imaginary power of filmmaking. He also picked up the airbrush again, which he now mastered, rendering mists and moon glow for his background painting. It was here that he became a showman, and first recognized the potential of the imaginative element in landscape painting. Touched by the magic of Hollywood, he started calling himself the Painter of Light. Just as inspired as Thom, Jim Gurney went on to create the successful illustrated book series Dinotopia. Both of them reached the pinnacle of success in their fields, and they remained friends for life.
With the publication of the manuscript, and money in his pocket from his work on Fire and Ice, Thom called Nanette on the phone one day and proposed to her. They were married on May 2, 1982, in a chapel in Placerville, and moved into a small house on the edge of town. Ironically, a few months after their wedding, Glenn Wessels died at the age of eighty-seven. Thom was able to put his mentor to rest and take on his mantle, using the artistic gifts Wessels had given him.
Nanette, now a practicing nurse, supported them both in those early days. During those years, Thom continued to develop his craft and even took on a brush name, Robert Girrard, under which he began experimenting with Impressionism. He set himself up in a little weather-beaten cottage on Wallace Road, painting small landscape paintings, which he sold in the parking lots of the local supermarkets. He had begun the life he had always dreamed of.
Walking down Wallace Road is like entering a fairy tale. There’s something about the way the light dances through the flickering leaves that must have felt like a hidden garden in heaven for Thom. His studio stood at the bend of the road, near a big red barn on an adjoining farm. It was a humble wooden cottage with a smokestack, log walls, and wood-framed windows that blended into the forest behind it.
The studio would always smell strongly of his art supplies. Thom used to talk about how much he loved the musty, pungent smell of oil and turpentine in a painter’s studio. He remembered experiencing it for the first time in Glenn Wessels’s studio and feeling that there was something wild and exotic about it, something sensual even. It always made him want to paint.
The studio was a bare open room with a concrete floor and naked white walls lined with shelves that held numerous paintings and canvases. Thom had a desk with a globe on it and a stuffed deer head just above it. On the floor was a stuffed stalking fox, and beside it the statue of a white marble cherub that supported the wooden box with Thom’s paintbrushes, all lengths and thicknesses, sticking out like the quills of a porcupine.
Day after day, Thom sat on his swivel stool, wearing an apron and holding a paintbrush in his left hand and a palette in his right. Day after day, his brush danced over the canvas, leaving indelible trails of color and light. Nanette’s work as a nurse continued to support them, and Thom painted and continued to sell his work outside of supermarkets and also to some of the local gift shops in town.
Thom might have been content with this life. He should have been nobody in particular; just a local artist selling his wares to gift shops and galleries around Placerville, and finding collectors and fans among the chance pedestrian visitors to Carmel-by-the-Sea for the Sunday art fairs. If two things hadn’t happened, this would have been the case. But they did happen, and both events changed his life.
On a spring day in 1987, Thomas Kinkade loaded his easels and canvases into the back of his red vintage 1965 Ford pickup truck at five in the morning, the way he always did, and went off to the Carmel Sunday art fair. He had been up all night framing paintings, in the morning wrapping them gently in rags and blankets. Thomas was going to take his supplies and set up an easel at the fair, so people could watch him paint and buy his art. He filled his canvas bags with a rainbow assortment of tubes of oil paint and clean brushes, and packed a new palette. On this April morning, the day that would change his life, there was a bite of frost in the mountain air as he tied down the tarp over the back of the truck. Then he got into the cab, started the engine, and drove off, disappearing down Wallace Road, the early sun lighting his way.
Rick Barnett was also nobody in particular, a Northern California boy who lived the carefree California life. He was tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with the looks of a movie star. And he was one of the best vacuum cleaner salesmen in the Kirby Vacuum Company. He had an all-American wholesomeness, a boy-next-door sincerity in those blue eyes, which just seemed to make people open their wallets and buy vacuums. He was that tall six-foot-three handsome stranger standing in an open doorway of a sleepy suburb tract house in Salinas or Fremont, smiling his winning smile, and asking if the woman of the house wanted a carpet-cleaning demonstration. Nobody could sell like Rick Barnett.
Kirby vacuum salesmen are trained in the hard sell. Access is the first necessity for success; getting inside a house where people are vulnerable and can’t escape. The longer you’re in, the more you can wear down defenses. Unpacking countless vacuum implements and spreading them throughout the room, dumping salt over rugs and floors, rearranging furniture for the vacuum demonstration force the potential buyer to allow the salesman to take hours to go through his routine. And the longer the exposure to the sell, the more likely it is to close.
By the end of the demonstration, the homeowner is frightened, pressured, manipulated, and guilty—not to mention feeling responsible for the salesman meeting his quota and winning a vacation. Buoyed by last-minute deals, discounts, and financing rates, the salesman closes the deal. And Rick was the best of the best. His charisma and sincerity engendered trust in those he was selling to. Whether it was vacuums or paintings, Rick Barnett was brilliant.
Thomas Kinkade met Rick Barnett on that spring day in 1987, at the Carmel Sunday art fair in Carmel-by-the-Sea on a picturesque flower box promenade of quaint wine shops, trinket stores, and art galleries. Every Sunday, vendors set up their tables along the sidewalk filled with arts and crafts, homemade jams, pastels, watercolors, and paintings. Thom sat on a stool in front of his easel, wearing his French beret, and painted the Carmel street scene to look as though it was a hundred years ago. In his rendering, the cottage-thatched roofs were more crooked than the real ones; the Tudor beams on the buildings more uneven and quaintly bending into the stucco walls. In Thom’s painting, Ocean Street was empty; only a horse-drawn carriage stood in the distance as the early morning light touched the trees and flowers.
Within minutes, Thom drew a crowd. His brush darted over the canvas as though it barely touched it. He dipped it into a dollop of colors that magically became sprays of luminous daisies and begonias in the window boxes of the shops. You could hear murmurs and gasps of awe as Thom’s brush transformed the canvas into a magical land from a distant time. It was as if he saw things that were invisible to the naked eye; people saw a vision of the street that only he could conjure with his paintbrush.
That same morning, Rick Barnett stepped out of the Carmel Pipe Shop and unwrapped his Sunday cigar, sliding the burnished leaf under his nose to capture the cured essence of brandy. Vacuum sales were good to Rick, and his pockets were lined with his commissions. Clipping the head and drawing the fire through the bundled leaves, Rick puffed the cigar gently to life, tossed the match, and walked down the street, toward the white tents of the Carmel Sunday art fair dotting the distance.
Rick always described how he had stopped, transfixed, when he came to Thomas Kinkade’s booth. Thom’s easels were covered in landscapes and quaint city scenes, painted in his stunningly colorful, romantic realism. Rick stood and watched, along with the other impressed onlookers, as Thom slowly created a masterpiece before their very eyes. The more his brush passed over the canvas, the more he created what seemed like a window into another world: a parallel universe similar to the one they were standing in at that very moment, and yet heightened into a sentimental depiction of imperfect reality.
Rick watched as Thom smiled and answered questions, never taking his eyes off the canvas. People asked him how he could paint such beautiful images. Thom kept dabbing the canvas, speaking softly and smiling as people watched him. He liked to explain his process to his admiring public. He told them that he stepped into the painting; that there was no boundary for him on the canvas, as though he couldn’t feel his brush on the linen. He told them that his paints were like beams of light to him, penetrating into another world, and that the world would then come to life.
Rick was stunned. How could a painter of this magnitude, of this level and extraordinary skill, be sitting on a foldout stool, displaying his masterpieces from the back of a pickup truck? Rick took a quick inventory of the paintings, saw how many there were, and that one was more masterful than the next. And with the price tags dancing in the ocean breeze, he got an idea. He could sell these paintings. His mind made quick calculations. How many could he sell in a day? How many could Kinkade paint in a week? How much were they worth? How many people could he get to buy them? Certainly more than the haphazard foot traffic of Carmel’s Sunday collectors. Rick was thirty-four years old, and still selling vacuums. Selling paintings would be a lot more dignified and a lot more lucrative. As long as he put his sales genius behind it, he couldn’t go wrong.
Rick stepped forward and introduced himself. He told Thom that he felt his work was the best he had ever seen, and that he should be represented in all the galleries of Carmel and beyond. Then he spontaneously offered to represent Thom’s work, if he would agree to make Rick his exclusive art dealer. He said he was in sales, and that he thought he could get him exhibited in museums across the world.
Thom stopped painting, looked at Rick, saw the fire in his eyes and heard the intense conviction of his words. Thom scanned this tall, handsome young man and saw the confidence of his stance, felt the freshness and charisma. As Thom told it, there was something about Rick; something familiar that he recognized: a feeling as if he had met him before.
Rick pulled a business card from his jacket pocket, handed it to Thom, and asked him to give him a ring. And with that, Rick turned and walked away. Thom sat on his stool and turned the card in his hand. It read RICK BARNETT. KIRBY HOME CARE SYSTEMS. He looked up and watched Rick disappear down the street.
Neither man’s life would ever be the same.
Ken Raasch was nobody in particular, either. He was an entry-level executive with a small finance firm in downtown San Jose. He had been hired despite his lack of formal training in the field of accounting, and was making a modest living while dreaming big. Part of making a modest living meant that he was living in his mother’s house with his newlywed bride and a baby. He couldn’t pay his parking tickets back then, but he was always an impeccable dresser. Even if he wore an off-the-rack suit from a discount store, it gave him the look he desired. It was always his firm belief that if you looked successful, then success would follow.
Ken dreamed of starting his own business, and he would sit in his mother’s house with his wife, Linda, and talk for hours about his plans, dreaming up schemes and new ideas that Linda always supported. Money was an issue for this young couple, but Ken reassured her of his big plans for the future, and the houses and cars they would own one day. Then one day, in 1988, Linda showed Ken a wedding invitation that had just come in the mail. A friend of theirs was having a seaside wedding in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The future was just beginning, and they had no idea how much things were about to change.
In the summer of 1988, Nanette and Thom had just welcomed their firstborn daughter, Merritt Christian Kinkade, into their lives. It was a happy summer with their growing family. On the day of their friend’s wedding, Thom’s mother, Mary Ann, stayed with the baby so Thom and Nanette could attend.
The wedding was set along the seaside of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Thom and Ken Raasch found themselves seated at the same table. They introduced themselves and talked about their work. Thom told Ken about his art practice, and how he had been selling his work to galleries around Carmel, Monterey, and San Jose with the help of his personal art representative, who was a former vacuum salesman. In fact, Rick Barnett was so successful at selling Thom’s art in galleries that within a year he had quit his job at the Kirby Vacuum Company.
While the wedding festivities went on, Linda and Nanette sat chatting about their newborn babies, and Thom told Ken about his desire to create a business of reproductions with his paintings. Rick Barnett was selling originals to galleries, but Thom wanted to make lithograph copies and greatly expand the number of times he could sell an image. Ken thought it was a great idea. Ken hadn’t even seen his work yet, but there was something about Thom that made Ken believe in him. Thom was passionate, sincere, and ambitious. When Thom talked about his ideas, Ken’s imagination was lit on fire and he could share in Thom’s vision. And on that very day, at that very wedding, they decided to go into business together, Ken offering to raise the capital to fund Thom’s dream.
Six months after their meeting at the seaside wedding, Thom and Ken were to be found in the garage of Thom’s modest Placerville cottage every day, wedged between paint supplies and easels, both of them hovering over the latest lithographs back from the printer. Ken had borrowed $30,000 from his mother, and he and Thom had formed Lightpost Publishing, their art replication business. Every cent went toward paper, printing, and gas. Thom would paint one of his bucolic scenes, and Ken would take it to be photographed and sent to the printer to produce a series of lithographs. These he would sell at art fairs and galleries, from Placerville to Carmel-by-the-Sea.
By this time, Nanette had quit her nursing job to devote her time fully to taking care of baby Merritt. The pressure to support the family now rested on the success of Thom and Ken’s mutual endeavor. Every day they pored over transparencies, judging the first proof, comparing the strike-off, their heads inclined over the image. They inspected the magenta values, and discussed the color registration of brooks and meadows and the virtue of cerulean blue. Thom was a perfectionist. And Ken was learning fast. Nothing left the garage for reproduction until it was perfect.
The space was small and crammed full of frames and rolls of canvas, and it smelled strongly of art supplies. For Thom, the world of ink and oil and enamel was his natural element. He had created works of art with potent chemical elements for years, and had been elbows-deep in oil paint and turpentine since he was a young teenager. Ken valued the perfect creases of his neatly pressed pinstripe suits. He was accustomed to the sterile cleanliness of an accounting office. To get his hands dirty from charcoal smudges or ink spills was a new experience for him.
But determination drove them both forward every day, as they sought to create the perfect lithograph of one of Thom’s works of art. At first they printed a hundred copies, which Thom would number and sign by hand. Then Thom and Ken framed them together and stacked them carefully with tissue paper between each one, loading them into boxes. On weekends, Thom and Ken and Rick filled up the back of Thom’s vintage pickup truck with all the art for sale, pile into the front seat, and drive to Carmel-by-the-Sea to offer up the latest works.
In addition to the Sunday art fairs, once in a while a gallery would take a work for sale. However, many of the owners were increasingly wary of the sweetness of Thom’s images. And the punch of the hyper-realism didn’t show well next to their more sophisticated interpretive artists. Art fairs were more successful for selling his art, and art expos even more so. Anytime Thom could interact with the buying public directly, there was no stopping the sale of his work. People loved his ebullient spirit, his friendly, easy manner.
He shook hands with everyone, smiling easily in his down-home unpretentious way. He joked with husbands about bringing their better half, and the couples would fawn over him, declaring how much they loved his work. He was humble and grateful for their compliments, and asked them which works they liked best.
If the wife said she loved the gates the best, then Thom turned to the husband and ribbed him: “If you love peace, then you’d better love the gates, too, sir, or you’ll find yourself locked out one day.” And everyone laughed.
“Remember, the wife is always right,” Thom added, and the couples laughed some more.
“Well, thank you and you make sure to visit my booth and take some information cards and some flyers and some brochures. They’ve got all kinds of good stuff to look at and take home. God bless,” Thom said. And he would turn and shake the hands of the next person waiting to speak to him. He made people feel special. He pulled them into his world for just a moment, and, more often than not, they’d end up buying whatever print they could afford.
When a print of Thom’s was sent to a gallery in New York or Miami, often the response was either a yawn or a snub. Most of the dealers were put off by the intangible quality of what they called “cheesiness.” Not so at the street art fairs and the expos. If Thom shook hands with someone, it almost always guaranteed a sale.
Creating and selling the reproductions of Thom’s artworks was a painstaking, laborious, and time-consuming process, but the three friends were slowly building a fan base for Thom, and making enough to get by after a good two years of hawking lithographs at art fairs.
Then, in 1991, a rep for the collectibles giant, the Bradford Exchange, saw Thom’s work displayed at the Art Expo New York and recognized in him the perfect kind of artist for the collectibles business. He instantly made Thom a proposition, asking him if he would be interested in selling his work through Bradford. Thom had to ask what that was. Like anyone selling art, the three friends had assumed that galleries and art fairs were the only ways to sell a painting. The Bradford executive explained that they reproduced paintings by famous artists on collectible items such as plates and mugs and music boxes—just like they did with Norman Rockwell’s work. Thom loved Rockwell, and his interest was piqued.
The rep laid a copy of Parade magazine on Thom’s display table and showed him the Bradford Exchange’s full-page ad on the back. He told Thom that their weekly ads in Parade cost them millions to run, but because they advertised in publications with the widest circulations in the country, their exposure and their customer base were huge. The rep felt strongly that Thom’s work would appeal to their customers. He conjectured that if they put his beautiful cottages and forests and glades onto collectible plates, he would be selling in the millions in no time.
Thom, Ken, and Rick had a meeting back home in Thom’s garage to discuss the Bradford Exchange’s proposition. Rick liked the sound of the volume of sales. Ken had never sold anything through a big business before. And all Thom had any experience selling, before selling his art, was pizza. So the three of them educated themselves about royalties and collectibles.
The Bradford Exchange was offering them a small but healthy percentage on the sale of any merchandise, and they had to make a decision. They looked at the statistics the company sent them. All products were tested ahead of time, and no image would be offered to the public on a plate before the Bradford Exchange was secure that the work would sell. The fact that they felt strongly that Thom’s work would sell was very convincing. Ken argued the strongest for making the deal. This became among the most important decisions Ken made early on, because it opened a gateway to the new world of limited edition collectible stores.
Ken argued that they didn’t need to sell art in galleries. That galleries were stuffy and snobby. They called the work “cheesy,” and they hated it. They only bought a few at a time, and acted like they were doing them a favor. Thom’s work was beautiful; everyone who bought his paintings and his prints loved them. Why did they need to go through galleries that hated the work? The Bradford Exchange would not only be a great source of revenue; their ads would promote Thom’s work like no other medium.
In 1991, Lightpost Publishing signed a deal with the Bradford Exchange. Thom’s cottages went up for sale on 8½-inch collectible plates all over America, and business began to explode. Sales doubled overnight and never stopped climbing. Even with a modest royalty, the sales through the Bradford Exchange quickly brought in hundreds of thousands per year, and would ultimately more than double in size, creating a very important source of revenue and exposure for the Painter of Light.
With the sudden income, the company moved the operation from Thom’s garage in Placerville to a large warehouse on Charcot Avenue in San Jose. Workers were hired to help assemble frames, package paintings and lithographs, catalog inventory, and box up and ship all the new collectibles that were moving out in droves.
In that same year, Thom and Nanette’s second daughter, Chandler Christian Kinkade, was born. Thom had already painted a picture in her name the year before, in 1990, in anticipation of her birth. He called it Chandler’s Cottage. It was a lovingly painted work of intense detail, depicting a thatched-roof cottage with white stucco and timber framing, with rounded corners and oddly shaped windows, giving the cottage a fairy tale–like appearance. The cottage stood perched along a stone walkway with a single streetlamp illuminating the dusk, and a lush garden of blooming flowers spraying in all directions in a pandemonium of color. In the background a hazy, muted sky loomed with hovering clouds and a stand of majestic trees beyond.
In 1990, he also painted a picture in honor of his firstborn daughter, Merritt, called Evening at Merritt’s Cottage. Since Merritt loved sunsets, Thom painted a cottage deeply nestled in a garden and fenced by a brick wall, with a gate with two pillars and lights to the left and right illuminating the entrance. A soft, rosy orange glow radiated in the sky above the cottage and the darkening ground. Inside a flowering garden, blooming rose vines and trees dappled the image with soft white blossoms that excited the otherwise settling evening darkness. Just like Chandler’s cottage, Merritt’s glowed bright with warm light from every window.
Thom was painting in themes, taking certain subject matter and reproducing it in variations. Besides the cottages, he also began to turn his painter’s eye to well-known cities. He traveled to places like New York’s Central Park and the Boston Common, and San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. In images such as Skating in the Park (1989) and Boston, An Evening Stroll Through the Common (1991), Thom captured the distinctive feeling of each city with exquisite detail, depicting the ice skaters and bare-branch trees in Central Park and towering apartment buildings along its borders, or the glistening streets beneath the glowing streetlamps in Boston’s illuminated square.
The sudden increase in income finally relieved pressure from Thom’s burgeoning family, and they moved from Placerville to San Jose. Their new home had more bedrooms, more children in the neighborhood, and was closer to the Charcot company location. By now Thom’s sister, Kate, had left Placerville and gotten married, and his brother, Patrick, had gone on to study at Berkeley. Only his mother, Mary Ann Kinkade, remained in Placerville, though she was a frequent visitor to see the grandkids. Thom and Nanette had to pinch themselves. Here was the dream, the one they had talked about for so many years, coming true before their very eyes. They had dreamed that Thom’s art would someday support them, and the new collectors were not only steadfast, they were voracious.
Every Sunday, Thomas Kinkade and his collectibles were seen on the back of Parade magazine, in the weekly full-page ad the Bradford Exchange took out. Inserted into every major newspaper in the country, the exposure was huge, and Thom’s art struck a nerve with America. Sales climbed and climbed.
The significance of the huge sales statistics of the Bradford Exchange didn’t escape Ken and Rick and Thom. They knew then that they had found their demographic; that the buyers for Thom’s art were not the highbrow art collectors and galleries; they were the steadfast middle-American Christian ladies with Hummel figurines at home. Not discerning art aficionados, but the unsophisticated sentimental mother with a station wagon full of kids. The traditional American midwesterner who didn’t frequent art galleries, but who would like to think of herself as loving art. These women had diminutive Lladro figures praying in their curio cabinets at home, and Norman Rockwell ornaments hanging from their Christmas trees. They wanted to see the world as whole and good, and they believed in America. And they began to buy Thomas Kinkade collectibles like crazy.
Through the Bradford Exchange, the Painter of Light sold ornaments and figurines, plates, music boxes, and mugs to a growing fan base. The collectibles business, together with the limited edition art publishing, began gaining critical-mass profits. Within two years, sales quickly went from $1 million to $20 million. The three friends had hit the jackpot.
No one could have been prepared for the sudden wealth. With the stakes raised high, a jostling for power began among the three founders. Because of his initial investment of $30,000, and since he was the largest shareholder, Ken felt he had proprietary rights over the company’s decisions, and sought to fund new avenues for the formula they had stumbled on. Thom saw his art sprawled across the back of Parade and saw his personal artistic vision turned into millions. And Rick, who lived in Monterey, set himself up along the waterfront near the pier, separating himself from Ken’s day-to-day business, and essentially creating his own fiefdom, to concentrate on his representation and sales of Thom’s original art.
The Charcot warehouse location wasn’t considered adequate anymore as a corporate headquarters. Ken convinced Thom that Ten Almaden Boulevard, the swankiest address in San Jose, would be better suited for their burgeoning company. Thom agreed, as he usually did, and withdrew to his studio, focusing on his paintings, and making an appearance at Ken’s Almaden headquarters perhaps four times a year.
As the millions poured in month by month, the three company founders, who had once huddled together in a garage, became their own separate satellites.
I lived in Santa Barbara at the time, where my wife and I had met in high school. We had three kids and owned a small ranch with gorgeous valley and mountain views. I was an artist’s representative with my own company then. I was also acting as a consultant for the Bradford Exchange. I was charged with finding new artists to add to their collection in hopes of replicating the success it was having with their already established artists. And by 1993, no one was more established, or selling more, than Thomas Kinkade.
It was the year Thom painted one of his iconic paintings, The End of a Perfect Day, in which he depicted a rustic stone cabin nestled in the inlet of a secluded lake, framed by distant snowcapped mountains. The entire image glowed golden, with light from the cabin spilling out onto the outside deck where a rocking chair stood waiting, and a small wooden dock with a fishing boat tied on, and ducks floating in the softly rippling waters. His most prominent originals, as this one became, later sold for $500,000 or more.
I traveled to Niles, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where the Bradford Exchange was headquartered, to meet with their senior vice president of product development and the new-artists team. Dan Byrne had been with the Exchange for a long time, and his recent departure for the Thomas Kinkade Company was still the talk of all the trade shows.
Sitting at the conference table with the executives, I laid out my images for this visit, showing them new artists I thought they might respond to. I showed them images of puppies, eagles, and kittens, but they remained unmoved. When I asked them what they were looking for, they said they were really only interested in finding someone just like Thomas Kinkade—and he was “unduplicable.”
I didn’t sell them on any of my artists that day.
Later that same year, I got a call from my friend Kevin Sacher, inviting me to come up and present my artists to Ken Raasch and the team at Media Arts. I couldn’t wait to meet with the rocket of success that was Media Arts Group and Thomas Kinkade.
It was 1994. Things were going so well that the three nobodies were drunk with success, and could still hardly fathom what they had on their hands. For Thom, his dream had come true. He and Nanette had once invested all they had into printing lithographs of his earliest paintings, in order to explore the duplication process as a way to expand the profit made from a single work of art. Now this dream had reached unimaginable heights. Rick had far surpassed his former vacuum sales days, and was never looking back. And Ken finally had his opportunity to get what he had always dreamed of: to be a successful businessman. Ken persuaded his partners that their success was only the beginning. He wanted to add other artists to the roster. He wanted to expand the formula, and he felt art replication was where it was at. To finalize his dream, he made his pitch. He reasoned that since the company had reached $30 million in annual sales, they should take it public.
By the time I had my interview, the original company name, Lightpost Publishing, a term taken from Thom’s paintings, had been changed to Media Arts Group Inc. and begun trading on the Nasdaq as MAGI.
And so the three nobodies became the three kings. And for the first time ever, an artist went public on the stock market.