CHAPTER 11

A Light in the Darkness

While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

The Thomas Kinkade Company announced it was emerging from bankruptcy on July 15, 2011. It had a new plan to repay its debts, and a growth strategy to reinvigorate Thom’s visibility in the marketplace. The company promised more paintings, more collectibles, and more venues and outlets to sell these products. It was even planning on opening new branded galleries in new locations. By this time, Ken and I had fulfilled our ten-year contract to exclusively represent the Thomas Kinkade Company’s licensing business. Robert Murray, counsel for the Thomas Kinkade Company, declared he was certain of a swift approval of the growth plan in bankruptcy court.

It was one year after the bankruptcy filing, and a year after Thom’s DUI. I had amicably parted ways with Ken Raasch by then. I wanted to branch out into celebrity brand licensing and investing, something Ken wasn’t interested in doing. Ken decided to remain with Creative Brands Group, and I opened a new company in order to focus on popular consumer brands, as well as celebrity and personality-based brands, for licensing, endorsement, and other strategic partnership agreements. I would also make strategic capital investments, particularly in the fashion and beauty industry. It didn’t change the nature of our ongoing friendship; only our business relationship.

John Hastings was doing a remarkably competent job as CEO, pulling the company out of its low point. He had also cleaned house in the process, removing all vestiges of Barnett’s Thomas Kinkade University and anything related to the lawsuits.

John Hastings wasn’t a sentimental man, but he was practical. The company had, to a fault, been run on friendships, allegiances, and the buddy system. Friends were hired, then fired, only to be hired again. Thom’s sentimentality was reflected in, and perhaps exploited by, those working in the company all those years. It had been a kind of family affair, and if you were in the “family,” you could do wrong and still remain a member. To his credit, John Hastings changed all that, to the benefit of the company.

Thom was sober for the first time; certainly for the first time in the sixteen years I had known him. He began working out, getting fit, and seeking help for his health in a facility in Palm Springs. For the first time in a long while, there was hope and clarity in his eyes. He set out to heal himself physically and also spiritually. He began visiting friends and family he hadn’t seen in many years, some of them going back to his childhood. In some of these visits, he would simply go to sit with someone and reminisce. With others, he went specifically to make amends, to ask for forgiveness, to set things straight and tie up loose ends.

Thom sought out Tony Thomopoulos on one of these visits, after not having seen him for ten years. Tony and Thom had lunch together, and Thom told him about his renewed outlook on life, and how he was finally sober. But Tony remembered feeling a sense of uneasiness. Thom seemed off to him, not the same Thom he once knew. Not least of the reasons for this feeling was that Thom, perhaps as part of his new bohemian style, was wearing blue nail polish that day.

Although it might have been a sign of recovery and returning health for Thom to make his rounds and visitations, I had a sense that he knew somewhere deep inside that he was saying goodbye. Thinking back I couldn’t help but think of the many times Thom had made predictions of his early death.

“I won’t be around to see it, but —” he would preface his sentences.

“When I’m gone, the art market will rethink my value,” he would say.

“Isn’t it strange how so many of the great artists in the world don’t live for very long?”

“I’m like van Gogh, or Lautrec, or Hemingway. I’ve come to do an important job, but I won’t be around for the long run.”

He would say it matter-of-factly, like the idea didn’t frighten him. Perhaps he felt it was the mark of a great artist to die young. It was certainly a commentary on his priorities that any fear he ever had hovered around losing money, as opposed to losing his life.

Thom even visited Nanette’s parents in this period of visitations and contrition. He spent a considerable amount of time with them, in fact. From what I was told by Ken, the only persons he didn’t visit, and never forgave and didn’t ask forgiveness from, were Nanette and his daughters, the youngest of which was fifteen, the oldest twenty-two. After the intervention, he just couldn’t face them, and their interactions were tenuous and strained. His shame and misplaced sense of betrayal must have been so deep that he allowed himself to be separated from his family.

Nanette, whom he immortalized in his paintings, and his daughters, whom he honored in his work by naming cottages and houses after them, were what he cared about the most. His marriage of thirty years had helped to create everything he had, most importantly the lovely daughters he adored. I didn’t believe in his reluctance to see them, or his defensive stance regarding his newfound freedom. Perhaps if he could have forgiven them, he would have been truly healed.

Instead he lost those he loved the most.

Six months after the separation, a new woman entered Thom’s life. She was attractive, with long dark hair and a big wide smile: Amy Pinto-Walsh. Besides her pleasing features and her considerable intellect, she had a figure that could be described as voluptuous. This was not surprising, given Thom’s particular taste in the female anatomy. After a brief period of dating, Amy moved into Ivy Gate Cottage with Thom, and finally into the main house.

Amy was in her forties when she met Thom. She was well traveled and worldly, born in India and raised in Kuwait. She was a model student when young, valedictorian in her class, and a good citizen, involved in her church. She wasn’t just attractive; she was also smart, with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of South Carolina. She was married once and had two daughters from the marriage. When she met Thom, she devoted herself to him very quickly. Nanette and her daughters moved out of the Monte Sereno estate, and Thom and Amy moved into the main house. Amy and Thom continued a relationship that lasted for eighteen months.

Despite his attempts at staying sober, Thom’s health was bad; he was teetering on the edge of survival with hypertension and heart disease, and his body and organs were deeply damaged by alcoholism.

Thom had mortgaged his houses and used up most of his available cash to help the company survive through its turmoils. The very thing he had feared his entire life was haunting him now; he was running low on resources, with only real estate to his name. And he hadn’t even begun the divorce proceedings, which were bound to deplete him even more.

Patrick, Thom’s brother, who was still an associate professor in Fort Worth, Texas, had steadily been involved with the company on the side, publishing books and often going out on the meet-and-greet circuit when Thom wasn’t up to the task. In late 2011, Patrick traveled to the Talladega Superspeedway for the press conference announcing the release of Thom’s latest painting, This Is Talladega, in which Dale Earnhardt’s car is seen speeding along the track at Talladega while crossing the finish line. Patrick knew about his brother’s alcoholism and saw him finally get sober. But he also saw the toll that negative press and aggregate losses had taken on his psyche, even if Thom acted to the outside world as if it didn’t bother him.

Rick Barnett left the Thomas Kinkade Company after the lawsuits. He had become a very wealthy man through his long, loyal involvement with Thom, and it was surely a personal loss for Rick. But it must have been a personal loss for Thom as well, since Rick had been his confidante and his supporter for all those years.

In the summer of 2010, Rick Barnett formed a new company, International Artist Management Group; IAMG, a strange inversion of MAGI. Rick formed this company with Greg Burgess and Brad Walsh, the same Kirby colleagues he had hired at Media Arts. Their press release stated that they would be creating “superstars” in the art world, the way they had done with Thomas Kinkade.

IAMG called their artists “masters of light” and showed their work in the Masters of Light Gallery. Rick also renamed his Thomas Kinkade National Archives Gallery the Masters of Light National Archives Gallery. The venture lasted two years, and according to some of the artists who were represented, it then ceased operations as quickly as it had opened.

After I left Creative Brands Group to form my own company, Ken kept it going for some time, even though it operated only to maintain what little business was left to be managed.

In the last few years of Thom’s life, I began to lose touch with him. I felt he was hiding from me, from his family, from the world. All those times we spent together, when Thom was talking about his family and his past, and espousing his values and the idea of simpler times, just didn’t mesh with who and what he had become. Amy Pinto was another factor that alienated him from some of his former friends who were loyal to Nanette. It was sad for me. I missed my friend Thom but, in some sense, to me he was already gone.

After Thom’s separation from Nanette, Ken seemed to take on the role of replacement confidante. Thom needed Ken, and for two years Ken tried to save him. Ken talked to him about his relationship with Pinto and his estrangement from Nanette. Although Thom was painting as always, his body was giving out. Ken sent him to doctors and specialists, suggested rehab, encouraged his sobriety, and spent a lot of time trying to change him in any way he could. After all of their ups and downs, Ken remained loyal. Ken was Thom’s confessor, his bodyguard, and his brother; that bond was real from the day they met. They had quarreled along the way, but the love they had for each other was deep and everlasting. Even the house debacle had clearly been forgiven when, in 2012, Ken put his house on the market to be sold in exchange for $29 million in Facebook stock.

A month before Thom died, Ken and Thom traveled to the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch in the Texas Hill Country. There is a picture of Thom kneeling in a field of bluebonnets, smelling the soothing fragrant flowers. Ken told me later that it was the best thing he and Thom ever did together. There was something about the fact that Thom was close to death that made remembering it so special.

Ken remained the one steadfast friend in Thom’s life, until the very end.

What is the mark of a great artist? We can measure auction bids, asking prices, critical acclaim, and museum retrospectives. Or $4 billion generated in the name and the work of one artist. And who decides?

What would sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari and the scholars at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the first art academy in Florence, have said standing in front of works by three artists—Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, and Thomas Kinkade? They would have dismissed the first two as painted by lunatics, perhaps the work of disturbed children, accidents of errant paint, blasphemous and heretical at worst. And while they might have dismissed Thom’s technique as falling considerably short of the skills of their alumni Michelangelo Buonarroti or Benvenuto Cellini, he might still have been the only one not ridden out of town on a rail.

Thom’s work is easy to digest. The colors of his flowers and landscapes are super natural. The forms of his naturescapes are exaggerated and fantastical. His representation of the world is überromantic, pushing beyond the unreal into the surreal. Perhaps it reminds us of the whimsical backdrops of a painted animated film: magical and shamanistic.

Thom made countless people happy with his art. Millions who bought his paintings had never bought a painting before in their lives. The notion that they might step into a gallery and purchase a work of art was simply inconceivable to them; an inaccessible possibility until Thomas Kinkade came along. He made them feel like they belonged at the table. He made them feel like they could take pride in their home, and display an actual work of art on the wall. He made them feel like they, too, could play in the playground of the art world. That they could own something precious, something they enjoyed looking at every day.

Art doesn’t have an expiration date; you don’t grow tired of a painting the way a song might wear itself out in too frequent listening. Twenty million homes, and how many walls—how much joy did Thom spread with his art?

When the question comes down to money, there is no easy answer. Does a painting become more or less beautiful based on its fluctuating value in the marketplace? The art market, like any market for that matter, is an illusory thing, determined by intangibles. During the Dutch golden age, tulip mania gripped a fevered market and then collapsed. At its height a single tulip bulb cost ten years of a craftsman’s salary. The speculative market is fickle and transient, but a tulip remains beautiful. And a Thomas Kinkade painting remains something that gives people joy.

Ken Raasch said, in the Forbes magazine article about Media Arts in 1998, that everything the company did had to carefully fit Thom’s image—and make people feel good about themselves.

The billion dollar painter made millions of people feel good about themselves until his dying day.

But as Thom’s perpetual light shone in every home of his collectors, his own light was slowly being extinguished.