Marcel Winatschek

AT-ATs in the Painter of Light

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings have a specific quality—a warm amber glow from every window in every cottage in every idealized American nowhere—that makes them either deeply comforting or mildly nauseating depending on your relationship to sentimentality. They were everywhere for a while: mall galleries, church bazaars, your aunt’s hallway. The Painter of Light, he called himself. Critics had other names for him.

What Jeff Bennett did was drop Star Wars’s Imperial forces into that glow. AT-AT Walkers in the snow-dusted village. Stormtroopers flanking the rose-covered gate. A Rancor lurking at the treeline. The result is funnier and more compelling than it has any right to be—because Kinkade’s worlds are so relentlessly soft that the intrusion of hard geometry and fascist iconography doesn’t shatter the mood so much as complete it. There’s something honest about an AT-AT in a Kinkade landscape. The warmth was always a little militarized.

Hanging one of these over your sofa says something true about the world. I respect it entirely.