Thomas Kinkade, one of the most popular artists, passed away on Friday at the age of 54. Kinkade died at his Los Gatos home in the San Francisco Bay Area from natural causes, according to David Satterfield, a spokesman for the family. It has been rumored that his paintings over $100 million per year in sales and are featured in over 10 million homes within the United States.
“I’m a warrior for light,” Kinkade said in a 2002 interview. “With whatever talent and resources I have, I’m trying to bring light to penetrate the darkness many people feel.”
In the middle of the 2010’s, Kinkade’s Media Arts Group went private, but before doing so it reportedly took in $32 million each quarter from over 4,500 dealers in the United States. Kinkade’s paintings range in price from a couple of hundred dollars to $10,000.
Ken Raasch co-founded Kinkade’s company with him and said, “I’d see a tree as being green, and he would see it as 47 different shades of green. He just saw the world in a much more detailed way than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
On Kinkade’s website, a biography said that he declined “the intellectual isolation of the artist made each of his works an intimate statement that resonates in the personal lives of his viewers. I share something in common with Norman Rockwell and, for that matter, with Walt Disney, in that I really like to make people happy,” Kinkade said.
Kinkade also said that painter Norman Rockwell was one of the first heroes in his life. “I remember my mom had a big collection of copies of (Saturday Evening Post) magazines, and that was really my introduction to those great illustrators,” he said.
Kinkade was born in Placerville, California and attended the University of California at Berkeley and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
“I was always the kid who could draw,” Kinkade said. “I had this talent, and it was the one thing that gave me some kind of dignity in the midst of my personal environment.”
In 1982, Kinkade married his lifelong sweetheart, Nanette, whose name was hidden often in his paintings along with the names of his four daughters.
“Thom provided a wonderful life for his family,” Nanette said. “We are shocked and saddened by his death.”
There has not been an official cause of death released yet but it has been reported that natural causes will be named by the coroner’s office.