“…The Costs of Turning Yourself from a Three-Dimensional Person into a Two-Dimensional Brand”: Miranda Yousef on Her SXSW-Premiering doc Art for Everybody

One of the most surprising revelations about the painter (and multimillion-dollar mass marketer) Thomas Kinkade, “the most successful artist of his time” according to the synopsis for Miranda Yousef’s SXSW-premiering doc Art for Everybody, is not that he was, well, “the most successful artist of his time.” Nor that after his death a decade ago from a drug and alcohol overdose his family discovered a secret trove of rather dark and sometimes disturbing work, images at complete odds with the sugary sweet depictions of small-town life that once graced the walls of the Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises, a ubiquitous presence at US malls throughout the ’90s. No, it’s that Kinkade was much more than some Trump-style showman, hawking branded kitsch on QVC. Ignored by the (white) art world cognoscenti and beloved by the (white) working class masses, Kinkade was likewise a dedicated family man and a practicing evangelical since college. Painfully earnest to his core, he was a man bent on fulfilling a populist mission to create art for everybody (or “Art for Anybody,” per the catty title of Susan Orlean’s 2010 New Yorker profile), one which, unfortunately, would lead to the “Painter of Light” (a lofty moniker originally given to J.M.W. Turner that Kinkade coopted and trademarked for himself) irrevocably flaming out. Just prior to Art for Everybody’s (March 13) SXSW launch, Filmmaker caught up with the first-time director (and veteran editor) to learn all about her impressively enlightening debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.