”Art for Everybody” with Miranda Yousef

This holiday season, discover another side to “The Painter of Light”!  In our final installment of "Live from Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival", Miranda Yousef joins Mike to discuss her feature documentary, “Art for Everybody”.  From an early age, Thomas Kinkade struggled with the impact of his impoverished youth, torn between emulating van Gogh’s critical regard and seeking the economic success of a Norman Rockwell or Walt Disney.  As Yousef explains, turning himself into a successful brand cost Kinkade dearly, and in the thousands of “unpublished” works that he left behind, we can sometimes glimpse revealing aspects of Kinkade as an artist as well as a living, breathing human with a multi-faceted personality.

 

While firmly grounded in her subject, Yousef’s film manages to go well beyond the life and oeuvre of this one individual to ask questions about the nature of art:  Is it meant only to “talk to” other art, to problematize representation, or can it also properly provide joy and even comfort?  And her film may ultimately be read as a plea that no matter what value we place on Kinkade's art, that we not hold disdain for those who appreciate it differently.

 

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