What if the fall never happened? What if we lived in a world of light, untouched by evil? Answering that question was the quest of popular painter Thomas Kinkade (1958–2012). Kinkade once described his work this way: “Light is what we’re attracted to. . . . I like to portray a world without the Fall.”
This vision was popular. Kinkade, known as the “Painter of Light,” became a best-selling artist. Yet while he met with business success, he couldn’t paint away the reality of a sin-cursed world. A new documentary called Art for Everybody reveals what was hidden behind the glowing scenes of cottages and lighthouses: a man plagued by the reality of a fallen world. He reportedly died, at 54, of an accidental alcohol overdose.
There’s a glaring contradiction between Kinkade’s tumultuous life and the scenes he painted. But this contradiction provides an opportunity for reflection. Kinkade’s art held deep appeal for Christians and was called “quintessentially evangelical.” Yet the desire for art that omits the reality of sin is a desire for redemption without the cost of the cross. Christians whose artistic tastes are shaped by the drama of the gospel can appreciate art that tells the full story of redemption, which necessarily includes the fall.
Extremes of Sentimental and Transgressive Art
Kinkade recognized that his art is sentimental. He said, “High culture is paranoid about sentiment. But human beings are intensely sentimental. And if art does not speak a language that’s accessible to people, it relegates itself to obscurity.”
Christians whose artistic tastes are shaped by the drama of the gospel can appreciate art that tells the full story of redemption, which necessarily includes the fall.
Unsurprisingly, he ridiculed the transgressive art popular during his career, such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998). While Emin’s “art” gloried in the fall and the transgressive, Kinkade ignored them completely. These two extreme approaches miss the robust doctrine of redemptive beauty presented in the Bible. It’s easy for the Christian to reject transgressive art. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or Emin’s My Bed are obviously ugly and the products of a culture of death. Sentimental art, however, is the opposite extreme. It offers beauty that bypasses brokenness and evil. Cheap beauty avoids the cost of redemption.
In the reaction against postmodern transgressive art, it isn’t surprising that Christians gravitate toward sentimental art. Roger Scruton calls this sentimentality the kitschification of Christianity:
Kitsch is not, in the first instance, an artistic phenomenon, but a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. . . . The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.
The desire for sentimental, feel-good, Hallmark-style art stems from a hunger for true beauty. And if our enjoyment of Kinkade-style art inflames these longings and hunger for true beauty, inspiring us to worship Jesus, that can be a good thing. But the sentimental is dangerous if it becomes a substitute for transcendent beauty. Sentimental art is reductionistic if it doesn’t point beyond itself in any way. In this case, it misses art’s capacity to show the abundant fullness that hints at a beauty beyond itself. Rather than pointing to a transcendent goodness, truth, and beauty, sentimental art often directs attention to itself—how pretty and nice it is.
Beauty That Satisfies
So, what beauty will truly satisfy? What should Christian-made art look like? The temptation is to react against sentimentality with a move toward gritty, edgy art. Another overreaction to kitsch art is to adopt the elitist mentality—pervasive in fine-art institutions—that dismisses any art with mass popularity. But neither reaction will satisfy us in the long run.
The answer to overly sentimental art is to let the storyline of redemption shape artistic tastes and art creation.
The Christian approach to art shows how goodness, truth, and beauty are on display in the history of redemption as God deals with the fall and evil through the cross and resurrection. Quintessentially Christian art takes into account the patterns of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Christian discernment will not allow for a sentimental sweeping away of the fall and evil. But neither will it revel in darkness and evil. Scripture doesn’t shy away from the hard realities of sin, depravity, and suffering in a fallen world. But it doesn’t glorify or wallow in them either.
Art Taste and Artists Shaped by the Gospel
My grandmother has a Kinkade lighthouse painting in her living room. It’s a symbol of the peaceful place her home is for our family. It evokes a longing for heaven. Even if the artist didn’t think this way, a viewer can approach sentimental art in light of the larger gospel frame that looks in hope to the better world that’s coming.
Still, the sentimental shouldn’t be the only art we create or consume. It’s unhelpful to replace the truth of the gospel with a fantasy that denies the fall. Jesus is the light of the world, but he entered into a world of darkness to redeem and transform it. The hope and glory of the gospel is all the more majestic for how hopeless and bleak life is apart from Christ.
Fyodor Dostoevsky offers a different vision of what painting the light could look like in Crime and Punishment. In a climactic and poignant scene, Dostoevsky shows a repentant murderer and a prostitute reading the Bible together over candlelight: “The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.” The beauty of that image is not just the illuminating light—it’s the details of suffering, sin, and darkness that describe what is being illuminated: a murderer and a harlot, in a “poverty-stricken room.”
Christian discernment will not allow for a sentimental sweeping away of the fall and evil. But neither will it revel in darkness and evil.
We can appreciate redemptive beauty in all art forms. Redemptive painting bears the sign of scars, sometimes even explicitly, like in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. The recent David movie is an example of Christian art that takes the fall and evil seriously, rather than ignoring them. This approach makes the restoration all the more powerful.
Not every work of art can convey the fullness of the biblical concept of beauty. Some works might focus more on the hope of light, while others look unflinchingly at the darkness of our sin and our desperate need for saving. But a Christian artist’s body of work should include depictions of both light and darkness—ultimately pointing beyond itself to the transcendent fullness of goodness, truth, and beauty. Thomas Kinkade’s life reminds us that art cannot save us. We cannot paint away the fall and the troubles in our lives. But we can look for (and create) art that points to the redemptive pattern of beauty.
The Gospel Coalition