[Lokutus]

Excerpts:

A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.

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

In litigation and interviews with the Los Angeles Times, some former gallery owners depict Kinkade, 48, as a ruthless businessman who drove them to financial ruin at the same time he was fattening his business associates' bank accounts and feathering his nest with tens of millions of dollars.

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.

Article

[Lokutus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lokutus', 'E')xcerpts:

A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.

[TheTurtle]

Are you responding to your own posts again, Lokutus?

Don't forget, dogs playing poker is classic art only if it is painted on black velvet ...

[Zentric]

I remember seeing a 60 minutes story a couple years back where the couple had bought so much Thomas Kinkade 'art' that they had literally run out of wall space inside their large-sized home.

Still, it beats meth addiction, I suppose.

[Specop_007]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lokutus', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lokutus', 'E')xcerpts:

A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.