AP Photo
World News
06.07.14
Pablo Escobar’s Private Prison Is Now Run by Monks for Senior Citizens
In
exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to
build his jail—complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23
years later, it's a home for the elderly.
As we continue our ascent, I consider the bizarre assortment of people who, over the past 25 years, have made the journey before me: the imprisoned drug lords, mass-murderers and street thugs, the politicians both noble and corrupt, the soccer superstars, beauty queens and prostitutes, the military brigades and would-be fortune hunters, the hermetic monks, religious pilgrims, and, as of recently, the low-income senior citizens.
I have arranged a meeting with Brother Davide—one of two monks who live at The Cathedral full time. But when I arrive at the entrance, the timid gatekeeper tells me—without explanation—that I can no longer speak with him. I am left to explore the grounds unsupervised, armed with nothing more than some archival photos and a rudimentary map of the old prison that I found online. With little of the original structure still standing, I find it quite difficult to get my bearings. With me is David Graff, a German journalist and guide at Palenque Tours in Colombia, who is acting as my translator.
The parking lot must be new because it's not on my map. Uphill, behind the parking lot, is more new construction: two small buildings with a courtyard and benches.] I can hear somber music playing—it sounds like Colombian bambuco. I notice some old weary faces staring back at me. The gatekeeper appears out of nowhere. "Those are the senior citizens," he whispers to me, "you're not allowed to go up there." Suddenly, it feels like a prison. Maybe even more so than it did twenty-five years ago…
***
By 1991, Medellín was the murder capital of the world. With the help of a CIA surveillance operation, the Colombian government was beginning to close in on Pablo Escobar's Medellín drug cartel. Feeling the pinch and running from hideout to hideout, Escobar began taking national dignitaries hostage and mapping out the conditions of his surrender.
Before Escobar and his posse would surrender, the drug kingpin had a few stipulations. His first demand was that the country's official constitution be rewritten to prohibit extradition. Second, that he be allowed to build his very own prison. There were a few other conditions, of course, such as the removal of Gen. Miguel Maza, one of Escobar's most determined rivals, from his post as the Director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS). Another requirement was that the Colombian National Police would not be permitted within a 12-mile radius of his prison.
Before he stepped down from DAS, Gen. Maza warned President Gaviria of the dangers of negotiating with a criminal of Escobar’s caliber. But President Gaviria assured him, "His treatment will not be any different from what the law demands."
Weeks later, with construction in full swing, Escobar and his brother returned to the site. They buried a stockpile of rifles and machine guns on a slope just above the building that was to house the inmates. "One day, we'll need them," Escobar told his brother.
Then, in June of 1991, a continental congress officially added an amendment to the Colombian constitution forbidding the extradition of nationals. After receiving confirmation that the amendment had been approved, Escobar finally revealed the location of his hideout.
Late in the afternoon of June 19, two government helicopters landed on a rock-strewn soccer field at The Cathedral. Escobar was the first to get out, setting his famous white velcro sneakers on the dirt. He then looked up to find 50 uniformed men all pointing machine guns in his direction. "Escobar gave a start," Gabriel García Márquez wrote in his book, News of a Kidnapping. "He lost his control for a moment, and, in a voice heavy with fearsome authority, he roared, 'Lower your weapons, damn it!' By the time the head of the guards gave the same order, Escobar's command had already been obeyed."
Although Escobar's Cathedral was still incomplete, it was habitable. Fences built ten-feet high with fifteen rows of electrified barbed wire surrounded the compound. There was a cinder-block home for the warden, seven guard towers, a collection of larger prison buildings on a clearing below, and a large building higher up on the slope that would house the prisoners. "It seemed to me a very prison-like prison," Alberto Villamizar, a diplomat who helped facilitate the surrender, said to President Gaviria. After saying goodbye to his family, Escobar entered the complex and signed a document of voluntary surrender in front of a special prosecutor. He then retired to his cell.
"Starting the next day," Márquez continued, "the very prison-like prison described by Villamizar began to be transformed into a five-star hacienda with all kinds of luxuries, sports installations and facilities for parties and pleasures, built with first-class materials brought in gradually in the false bottom of a supply van."
***
Sensing the eyes of the elderly upon me, I wander toward the lower buildings, which appear to be in fairly poor condition. According to the map, these must have been the prison dormitories. Half of the second story has been demolished and replaced by a small memorial building in the shape of a cross. At one end stands a life-size crucifix with a collection of golden AK-47's resting at Jesus' feet. Black marble slabs etched with the names of Escobar's victims hang on the walls.
The second half of the upper story looks like the original. It's empty inside, just four walls with a few crumbling archways and a concrete staircase that leads to nowhere. The metal doors of the basement level are locked. The entire structure has been newly painted in a variety of garish colors. There are no signs of The Cathedral's notorious five-star amenities. The prison had a gym, a billiards room, a bar, a disco where Escobar even hosted wedding receptions, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a waterfall, big screen TV's, and a life-sized dollhouse for when Escobar's young daughter would visit. During the drug lord’s imprisonment, The Cathedral was often referred to as Hotel Escobar and Club Medellín.“The prison guards served drinks from the sidelines and later, doubled as waiters in the bar.”
Behind the assisted living home is a lot where the soccer field used to be. Some claim that Escobar had workmen install a grid of high-gauge wire over the field to prevent the police, the military, and the rival Cali Cartel from landing a helicopter on the premises. In a 2010 ESPN documentary title The Two Escobars, one of Escobar's most loyal hit men, Jhon 'Popeye' Velásquez, who is still serving time in prison for terrorism, drug trafficking, and murder, said Escobar would routinely invite soccer players up to the prison for a game.
In fact, Velásquez also confesses that, prior to beginning their official 1994 World Cup qualifying run, all twenty-two players of the Colombia National team visited The Cathedral. The players made their way up the dirt road to the prison in a jolly convoy of dusty Jeeps and Land Cruisers. The team enjoyed a leisurely lunch with Escobar and his men. Afterwards, Escobar put on a pair of short-shorts and cleats and took part in a friendly match with one of the world's most famous soccer clubs. The young, professional players indulged the pudgy kingpin as he kicked his ball around in the dirt. The prison guards served drinks from the sidelines and later, doubled as waiters in the bar.
There is still an original guard tower near the tree line. Somebody (a monk, I presume) has put a dummy dressed in a guard's uniform inside. The place begins to feel like a second-rate Madame Tussauds. Nestled here, in the southwestern corner of the compound, is a heap of crumbling concrete.
Walls have toppled in on themselves, flights of stairs are covered in a carpet of soft, green moss, and the tips of rusted pipes curl out of the chaotic wreckage. I wander up the mossy stairs. I'm able to look down into an old room. The only identifiable artifact is a perfectly circular slab of concrete. A museum-like sign on the wall claims this was Escobar's cell and that the circular slab was where he had his rotating, round bed. In old pictures I've seen of Escobar's cell (which looked more like a Sofitel suite), his bed is square, so I'm inclined to think that this rotating bed was part of The Cathedral's elaborate disco. And I'm sure it was put to good use, too.
Escobar and his men were constantly drinking booze and smoking pot while inside. Sources say the drug lord became quite talkative when he was high. Needless to say, there was also a state of the art industrial kitchen on the premises, and Escobar hired many of the best chefs in Medellín to come cook there. On his 42nd birthday, the kingpin hosted a lavish banquet, and many of his friends and family were transported up to the prison for the fiesta. They ate stuffed turkey, caviar, fresh salmon, and smoked trout. Parties were commonplace, and models, beauty queens, and prostitutes were regularly driven up to the prison in the back of a covered military truck.
***
Escobar required a substantial cash flow to support this rather agreeable lifestyle. In order to get cash inside the prison, his men on the outside would squeeze tightly rolled wads of one hundred dollar American bills into milk cans. Then, whenever the early morning mountain fog provided enough cover, his men would bury the cans in the dirt surrounding the compound. Each can reportedly contained a million dollars. While wandering the grounds, I keep an eye out for suspicious lumps in the dirt.
After a few months of semi-retirement, Escobar grew restless. He was still the head of the Medellín Cartel and was being paid a "war tax" of $200,000 a month by each of the cartel bosses on the outside. But he wanted more. He desperately wanted to reconsolidate his empire. The CIA was still listening in on telephone calls from the hilltops surrounding The Cathedral. A busy job, I’m sure, considering every inmate was given his own Motorola cell phone. Aware of the constant phone surveillance, Escobar raised carrier pigeons to facilitate secure communication. Keeping in step with his characteristic boldness, Escobar even had little leg-bands created for his pigeons that read "Pablo Escobar—Maximum Security Prison—Envigado"
Unable to trust his corrupt Bureau of Prisons with the construction, Mendoza sought help from the U.S., only to find that they were prohibited from assisting in the construction of a prison that wasn't on American soil. Mendoza then approached Colombian contractors, but they were far too intimidated by the ever-present menace of Escobar. One contractor even said to Mendoza, "We are not going to build a cage with the lion already inside."
Mendoza finally found an Israeli security expert named Eitan Koren who was willing to take on the challenge. Koren drafted up blueprints. Workmen were hired from the most distant nooks and crannies of the country to ensure they weren't connected to the powerful cartel. It was a clever idea, but ultimately pointless. As work slowly began, Escobar's men were seen sitting on the prison fences writing down the license plate numbers of all the new vehicles that came and went from The Cathedral. Scared for their lives, most of the workmen walked off the job.
The Medellín Cartel was generating more revenue than ever. Two to three tons of cocaine were being trafficked into the U.S. every week—even more than before Escobar's incarceration. Safe within his mountaintop fortress, Escobar grew bolder and more unscrupulous. In July 1992, he made a move to take even more control of the cartel, one that would bring his residency at The Cathedral to an abrupt end.
On the outside, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, two bosses of the Medellín Cartel, were growing suspiciously wealthy. Escobar decided to raise their "war tax" from $200,000 to $1 million dollars per month. Escobar also stole $20 million from their private stash house. When Galeano and Moncada visited The Cathedral to complain, Escobar first lectured them about their place in the pecking order and then had them both executed in the prison. One account claims they were brutally tortured before being killed, that they were "hung upside down and bled like steers." Other reports claim that the bodies of Galeano and Moncada had been dismembered in The Cathedral and buried nearby so as to never be found.
News of the executions reached the government almost immediately. President Gaviria had had enough. "We made a huge mistake," Gaviria later said, "we underestimated the capacity of Escobar for corruption and intimidation. He was running his business from jail." On July 21, 1992, Gaviria gave the orders to move Escobar to a military base in Bogotá. There was just one tiny problem: nobody had the cojones to go in and get him—not Rafael Pardo, the Defense Minister, not Andrés Gonzales, the newly appointed Justice Minister, not Col. Hernando Navas, the Military Director of Prisons, not even Gen. Gustavo Pardo, who currently had The Cathedral surrounded with a four hundred man brigade.
Mendoza, who had recently been demoted to Vice Minster of Justice, resolved to go in and get Escobar on his own. Television reports of troops amassing in the hills around The Cathedral were all over the news. It was now dark, and any chance of a surprise attack had been squandered. Escobar was waiting for Mendoza as he walked up the dirt path and into the compound. He noticed Escobar and his men had all put on considerable weight during their imprisonment. The dining hall, it seemed, had been put to more use than the gymnasium.
"You have betrayed me, Señor Vice Minster," Escobar said to Mendoza. "President Gaviria has betrayed me. You are going to pay for this. And this country is going to pay for this because I have an agreement and you are breaking that agreement. You're doing this to deliver me to the Americans." On Escobar's order, Popeye took Mendoza hostage in the warden's house while Escobar tried to figure his way out of the bind.
With the Vice Minster of Justice now a hostage, Gen. Pardo's 4th brigade had little choice but to strike. All hell broke loose. Mendoza managed to escape amid the frenzy. A sergeant from the Directorate General of Prisons, Mina Olmedo, was shot and killed, and eleven other guards were badly injured. At some point during the madness, the most famous prison inmate in the world and nine of his henchmen simply walked out the back door, past a few guards, into the thick woodland of Mont Catedral.
***
The sky begins to cloud over. I'm standing at the eastern edge of the compound where Escobar would have entered the woods during his escape into the mountains. I'm surrounded by mossy ruins that just barely retain the shape of a building.
For fifteen years after Escobar’s escape, the carcass of The Cathedral sat in purgatory. It was far from deserted, however. With visions of million-dollar milk cans dancing in their heads, the people of Medellín flocked to the legendary prison with sledgehammers, pitchforks, and shovels. These would-be fortune hunters mounted what I imagine to be one of the largest, most enthusiastic civilian excavation campaigns in Colombian history. They dug, demolished, and dismantled The Cathedral brick by brick, looking for the leftovers of Escobar's fortune. Those who were more practical merely went to collect scrap metal, shingles, and other recyclable building materials.
Yovany Moncada, who at the time lived in Socorro, the closest neighborhood to The Cathedral, admitted to me that he was one of those hopeful amateur archaeologists. "We never found anything," he said. "Escobar's men, who knew where everything was, managed to get there first." The site also became popular with Pablo-pilgrims. Foreign tourists would often hike up the winding road and camp out in the ruins. Why? I haven't the faintest idea.
Things changed in 2007. The government of Colombia decided to loan the 28,000 square meter fixer-upper to a fraternity of hermetic Benedictine monks. In the seven years since they moved in, the monks have transformed the site into a "center of religious and cultural tourism" complete with a chapel, a library, a cafeteria, a guest house for religious pilgrimages, workshops, an ecological trail, and a memorial to victims of the cartel. What was once a half prison, half luxury resort is now part house of prayer and part house of horrors. The Cathedral was an oxymoron then and still is. It seems to be cursed with an endless identity crisis. In the last year, however, the monks have established a refuge for senior citizens who can't afford long-term care facilities in the city. The monks hired unemployed men and women to take care of the seniors and even paid for their training. Currently, there are twenty-four occupants.
The gatekeeper appears once again. I ask him about The Cathedral's reported ghost sightings. "I haven't seen anything," he mumbles, shaking his head while staring down at the ground, "but the night patrolman says he has seen white figures like floating blankets." Several others claim to have seen a robust figure wearing a hat and a poncho crouched against a table in the library. In 2010, nuns who were visiting the monastery had taken pictures of the waterfall just past where Escobar's bunker had been. Upon returning to Bogotá they developed the film and found bright lights rising up from the water. Apparently, they were terrified. The most terrifying thing I encounter during my visit is a fat, white Himalayan stray cat with red eyes and a scrunched up face.
A gigantic mural with a picture of Escobar behind bars hangs on an original thirty-foot concrete wall that supports one of the new seniors buildings. He is wearing a silly fur hat, and below his pudgy face is written, "Those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it." It's a big, fat cliché, but, right here, right now, it feels somehow applicable. Nearly half a mile down the mountain, the city of Medellín has its sights set on the future—on modernization, on redemption. Two months ago, Medellín was named 'Innovation City of the Year' by the Wall Street Journal However, the gangs still operate. And the cartels still traffic. But hell, progress is still progress.
As dusk approaches, a fog creeps up the slope of the mountain and swallows the sprawling city below—just like Pablo promised. Then comes the rain. As I head back to the car, I look up and watch the old folks slowly waddle to a nearby building for shelter. The somber bambuco music plays on.
JIM WEBER
Great Escapes
06.08.14
The Drunken Downfall of Evangelical America's Favorite Painter
Thomas
Kinkade’s death shocked his legions of fans—not only had the Painter of
Light died at 54, but the cause was alcohol and Valium. How did the
Evangelical Darling fall so far?
Evangelical Christians snapped up his bucolic garden scenes and cozy cottages with windows that glowed so much they seemed, as Joan Didion once wrote, “as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.” Kinkade painted “John 3:16,” along with the sign of the fish, the traditional Christian symbol for Jesus, in the signature of each of his sentimental works that now hang in around twenty million homes globally. He also published books and calendars that paired his paintings with verses from the Bible or inspirational aphorisms attributed to the artist himself: “The best things in life are yours for the choosing”; “Creativity has everything to do with the way you live”; “Your life has meaning and beauty, and you are not alone.”
Fans in Denver had been promised “a 30 minute inspirational presentation.” But what they got was an un-groomed, underdressed speaker who was none too pleased with the media’s coverage of his recent arrest for drunk driving.
“I sneeze in public, and I make a headline,” he sneered.
Then he complained about the media’s lack of attention to his charitable works: “America's most-known, most-beloved artist shows up at Orange County Hospital. We threw an all-day kids event, we hosted art contests, we gave art packages to all the kids…I talked to them about journaling their life, about creating something every day that makes a statement…and we sent word out to every newspaper: ‘Come down! See this day of joy! This day of celebration!’ No one showed. But make one wrong step in public and they put it on the front-page.”
When he was finished, Kinkade asked the organizers to make sure that his hotel room was alcohol-free, and then he kept the owner of Colorado’s Kinkade gallery up late into the night reminiscing about his pre-estrangement life with Nanette, his wife of thirty years. In happier times, they’d written The Many Loves of Marriage together, and Kinkade was still hiding “N’s” in his paintings as a tribute to her, even though they’d been separated for close to a year. “I was in my Carmel house, just medicated with alcohol,” he’d told a longtime friend of the weeks following the split.
A month after the event, Kinkade was sentenced to ten days in jail on the DUI charge. Sixteen months later, he was found unconscious and spent days in a coma. Doctors told him that if he didn’t get help, he would die. And two months after that, he did— on April 6, 2012, at the age of fifty-four.
The family released a statement attributing his death to natural causes, and fans gathered at the fifty or so independently-owned Thomas Kinkade galleries nationwide to celebrate his career. Sales skyrocketed. Marty Brown, who owns a gallery in Lake Forest, California, said he sold a million dollars’ worth of Kinkade product in the two months following the artist’s death—about five times as much as he’d sold in the entire previous year.
Then the autopsy came.
Kinkade had died of “acute ethanol and diazepam intoxication”—alcohol and Valium. Drinking had also led to a slew of chronic ailments: hypertension, an enlarged heart and fatty liver, along with numerous blunt force injuries probably caused by frequent drunken falls. His toenails had been painted a glittery gold color, and there was also green paint under his fingernails.
Grieving over his death quickly gave way to a highly public legal war between his widow Nanette and his girlfriend, Amy Pinto-Walsh. Pinto-Walsh produced letters written in Kinkade’s blurry, alcohol-fueled scrawl that promised her his home, his paintings, and $10 million to establish a museum of his works. The estate requested a gag order to prevent Pinto-Walsh from releasing photos and information damaging to the Painter of Light’s brand, and the matter was quickly settled out of court.
But the damage was done: Thomas Kinkade, America’s most inspirational painter, had been exposed in death as a man who had lived a life wildly at odds with the values he espoused. Kinkade’s wife and children had inherited his business, but the company’s value was an extremely open question. Driving to work on her first day back in the office,Kristen Barthelman, The Thomas Kinkade Co.’s head of licensing, was worried. "I did not have any sense of optimism," she remembers. The company’s revenues depended on licensing deals with companies like Disney and Hallmark, and Edstrom wondered whether they’d stay with the brand given the headlines swirling about Kinkade’s life. Then there was the question of the painter’s fans: would his mostly conservative following stay loyal, or would the degeneracy of Kinkade’s last years mean the end of the art empire that had been his American Dream?
* * * *
Before Thomas Kinkade was evangelical America’s favorite painter or 2012’s most high-profile case study on the dangers of alcohol abuse, he was a poor kid with a single mom in Placerville, California—a Rockwell-esque town, population 10,000, forty miles east of Sacramento. Kinkade and his brother, Dr. Patrick Kinkade, now the head of the criminal justice department at Texas Christian University, called their home “the slum of Placerville.” Patrick remembers the tubs of peanut butter stamped “Property of El Dorado County” that their mother told them were gifts from a friend. But he also remembers the sense of optimism she provided. When the pre-teen boys returned home from school to find their furniture repossessed, she told them she’d gotten rid of it because she thought it would be more fun to “camp out” in their house. They believed her, and thought she was the coolest mom ever.
Their interactions with their father, an alcoholic who scraped by with odd jobs doing janitorial work and driving rental cars between airports, were mostly limited to occasional road trips.
“He was a loveable sad sack,” Patrick remembers. “For a lot of years he was sort of this character in our lives. Thom and I both certainly felt that we were more sophisticated than he was. He’d go off on these tangents, these flights of fancy about what he was going to do with his life—these bouts of expertise that he really had no expertise about. He’d be so into it, and Thom and I would just sit there and smile and nod knowing that all this was nonsense and that my dad really didn’t have the capacity to carry out that plan. He wanted to sail around the Sea of Cortez; he had this weird little boat that in no way was ready nor was he a sailor. He had a hat and a map.”
As an adult, Kinkade blended his father’s grandiosity with his own herculean work ethic and clarity of purpose. He was perpetually broke while he studied at UC Berkeley and Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, but he’d still find $400 to drop in a single trip to Moe’s, a popular Berkeley used bookstore. He studied the master painters obsessively but never graduated from either school.
"In art school I was told so many times ‘your art is all about you,’” he later remembered. “And something about that didn't sit well with me. I began to realize my art's not about me, it's about you. It's about that other person. It's about letting something within you pour out in love to other people."
In the 1980s, Kinkade thought the art world had become detached from the public—and he saw himself as the person to return it to an artist-as-servant model, where painters affirmed rather than challenged social values. His hero was Andy Warhol, who, he felt, had rescued art from insularity and infused it with iconography that meant something to ordinary people; what Warhol did with soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Kinkade thought he could do with Eden-inspired garden scenes and Cotswolds cottages.
A post-college road trip led to the publication of The Artist’s Guide to Sketching, which helped him land work painting backgrounds for an animated movie, 1983’s Fire and Ice. After that, he focused on his own studio pieces—large-scale, Bierstadt-inspired panoramas of the American West that found an audience among California collectors.“The tragedy of my brother is he eventually fell to his own humanity. The triumph of my brother is that his art was never touched by that tragedy.”
Soon he approached Ken Raasch, a California entrepreneur, with the idea of setting up a printmaking business. He was already selling $5,000 worth of prints a month, he lied to Raasch (he wasn’t selling any). Though fraudulent inducement does not ordinarily augur well, it worked. With Kinkade’s feel-good paintings and Raasch’s acumen and $35,000 in startup capital, the business took off.
Kinkade’s charisma made him a live event star, and he was the first limited-edition artist to popularize the idea of highlighting prints—having craftsmen retouch reproductions with oil paints to make them look like originals. He was also among the first to offer the same limited edition print in different sizes. Advisors warned this would make them seem cheap, but instead it increased sales dramatically. And then he came up with the idea for a chain of small, mall-based galleries that sold only his work.
By the mid-1990s, Kinkade had become to the evangelical movement what Peter Max was to the psychedelic Sixties. As American homes expanded in size and contracted in originality, Kinkade’s stated mission was to fill as many of their walls as possible—and in the process, he filled more than anyone else ever had.
“We saw the power of art in a world that was changing,” Raasch explains of their Silicon Valley-based company that was unlike anything else in town. “What we believed in was the power of a still image to bring power and joy into people's lives. We felt that what hung on the walls of people's homes mattered.”
Kinkade, who referred to his pieces as “silent messengers in the home,” was unapologetic about his almost clinical efforts to make his work uplifting. “Every element in my paintings, from the patch of sun in the foreground to the mists on a distant horizon, is an effort to summon back those perfect moments that hang in our minds as pictures of harmony,” he once wrote in Lightposts for Living. “My deepest desire is that my work will help people aspire to the life those kinds of images evoke.” In more private moments, according to one former employee, he sometimes referred to his paintings as “a thirty-second vacation in a double-wide.”
The Thomas Kinkade Co. went public on the NASDAQ in 1994 and moved to the NYSE in 1998. In 2004, Kinkade borrowed money to take it private. A decline in sales, litigation over the failure of many of the independent galleries, and the bankruptcy of a subsidiary followed, but the company survived—and Kinkade remained, by far, America’s bestselling artist with a smaller, but still rabid, fan-base.
The company persevered, but Kinkade himself did not fare as well. He controlled his fondness for alcohol and strip clubs adequately when his wife was with him, but things spiraled out of control when he was on the road. By the mid-2000s, Kinkade’s family was pushing him into inpatient rehab as stories about his alcoholism started to make the news. The last five years of his life were characterized by the pattern of ups and downs familiar to many addicts.
“Thom believed that he should be able to control it, and that contributed to his downfall,” his brother remembers. “He had six months of sobriety and he was doing all these wonderful things. He was calling me and telling me: ‘Feeling good! Losing weight! Doing great!’ And then suddenly, you get a message: ‘Thom’s had a beer.’ Two days later, he’s into vodka. Seven days later, he’d dead.”
* * * *
With the passing of the Painter of Light, Patrick was thrust into the role of family spokesman, even as he struggled with his own grief. The company and its galleries had always depended on Thomas’s live events to drive sales, and now that job falls to Patrick, who tours the country to carry on the Kinkade name and spread its message of affirmation through art. He also makes regular appearances on ShopNBC.
In July of 2013, Patrick went to Cañon City Colorado to speak at one of the first exhibitions of his brother’s original paintings in decades. The Fremont Center for the Arts, a small museum located in what was once the town’s post office, had called the painter in February 2010 to see about setting up an exhibition. To their surprise, Kinkade had readily agreed. The drama surrounding the painter’s death had delayed things, but three-and-a-half years later, ten Thomas Kinkade original works, along with Patrick Kinkade, arrived at the museum. Demand for Patrick’s presentation was too large to be contained by the museum, and so the overflowing crowd gathered in what was once the Sunflower Bank on Main Street, surrounded by white plastic electric fans.
What Patrick presented was The Legacy Tour—a retrospective of his brother’s life and career that Thom had suggested in one of the midnight phone calls that accompanied his marathon painting sessions.
The presentation Patrick gave that day was an often funny (Patrick refers to himself as “The Brother of Light” and “the Billy Carter of the art world”) and always sentimental romp through Kinkade’s career; there were baby pictures, photos of the go-kart they made together, and examples of his brother’s masterfully executed Norman Rockwell pastiches from his art school days. He showed pieces by Rembrandt and Bierstadt followed by Kinkade’s works to trace the artistic influence, and he talked about the dog in Kinkade’s popular 1995 piece “Hometown Memories I: Walking to Church on a Rain Sunday Evening.”
That painting was based on the homes the brothers delivered papers to as children, and Patrick pointed to a cute dog in the foreground. While Thom was working on the piece, he called his brother and described the scene. “I’m painting Spotty,” he said.
Spotty had been a neighborhood menace. “That dog looks like a Dalmatian. It’s not. It’s half-Dalmatian, and half-Doberman,” Patrick explained, pointing at the piece in his PowerPoint. “Dalmatians are a little bit hyper. Dobermans are a little aggressive. Put em’ together, what do you get? Hyper-aggressive.”
“Why are you doing that?” Patrick had asked the painter. “We hated that dog.”
“To taunt you,” his brother replied. But in the painting, because this is a Thomas Kinkade piece, Spotty looks like a sweet little Dalmatian. “Thom was a romantic,” Patrick said.
Most of the hour was devoted to these sentimental stories steeped in Americana, Kinkade’s Horatio Alger rise from poverty, and a rousing defense of Kinkade as a great artist misunderstood by critics. Only at the very end did Patrick discuss the fact that his brother is no longer alive.
“My brother was a good man,” he said, pausing as he choked up along with much of the mostly middle-aged and older audience. “The tragedy of my brother is he eventually fell to his own humanity. The triumph of my brother is that his art was never touched by that tragedy. His art was affirmation that there was hope, there was beauty, and a statement of love that wasn't touched by this."
* * * *
ShopNBC’s sales of Kinkade products have risen in the two years since his death, with inspirational pieces like “Walk of Faith,” “Conquering the Storms,” and “A Peaceful Time” leading the way. After a natural slowdown following the postmortem craze, most Kinkade galleries report that their sales are a little higher than before his death. Not one of the company’s licensing partners ended its involvement with the brand following Kinkade’s death. They’ve been rewarded: Andrews McMeel Publishing says that sales of its Kinkade calendars rose 12 percent in 2012 and held that pace of sales last year. Hallmark has also seen double-digit growth, and Kinkade remains the top-selling painter of Disney images. The May 2014 issue of Global License! places Kinkade at #81 on its list of bestselling licensed brands, with $425 million in annual sales—ahead of CBS Consumer Products, National Geographic, and The Trump Organization.
In the weeks following Kinkade’s death, his estate tried to protect his brand: the gag order on his mistress and a statement attributing his death to natural causes were among the efforts they made to prevent the public from learning about the seedier side of Kinkade’s life. They didn’t work—but it didn’t matter. Kinkade’s fans have proven that they are willing to overlook his weaknesses because his paintings symbolize the values they aspire to. “I like to portray a world without the fall,” he once said. And just as Spotty, the neighborhood menace of Thomas Kinkade’s childhood, found new life as a cute Dalmatian in ‘Hometown Memories’, Kinkade’s fans remember him as they wish to. Many Thomas Kinkade collectors keep a photo of the painter in their living rooms, surrounded by his prints that have been mocked by every serious art critic of the past fifteen years.
The people who love Kinkade’s work will have plenty more to buy. When he began publishing in the late 1980s, he stopped selling his original pieces—storing them instead in a vault in northern California so that, when his singular vision was one day recognized by critics, students would be able to see the trajectory of his career as a continuous progression. A long-time friend describes him as “completely lacking in self-doubt,” and Kinkade once “bet” Susan Orlean, who was writing a profile of him, $1 million that there would be a major museum retrospective of his work during his lifetime. The vault contains paintings from Kinkade’s childhood and college years on through the end of his life—thousands of pieces in various stages of completion. Last year, his widow and his brother pulled 150 of them for posthumous publication, with a plan to release eight to 10 per year. (The most recent release is May’s “Lovelight Cottage”).
“His legacy in terms of new publications,” Patrick says, “will far outlive anybody who reads this article.”
Leon Neal/AFP/Getty
PARTNER CONTENT
The Art of Now
05.29.14
Art Goes High-Tech at These Four Innovative Exhibits
The
art world is embracing the rapid advances in technology, producing
creations that are highly innovative and just plain cool to look at.
In 2013, MoMA’s Rain Room, with the aid of motion sensors, allowed visitors to walk through a room of free-falling water without ever getting wet. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama had visitors waiting three hours to see her “reflection rooms” that mimicked infinite space with thousands of LED lights and mirrors. And, David Dutuna made art digitally interactive through the use of web-based Google Glass.
Dutuna debuted his Glass-based work at Art Basel Miami in December of last year, before it traveled to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Working in partnership with app developers BrickSimple, Dutuna concealed an American flag covered with small bits of memorabilia and applied a bevy of traditional glass frame lenses on top. These tiny historical moments embedded within Portrait of America became “activated” through the use of Google Glass, triggering a highlight reel from American Civilization.
While tech-based art began emerging in 2013, it’s taken over the art scene in a big way this year. Here are four exhibitions currently on display that show the interaction between the two disciplines and the possibilities that technology holds for future creations.
Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, Museum of the Moving Image
When an artist forgoes a fine arts degree in pursuit of one in electrical engineering and mathematics from MIT, it’s almost guaranteed that technology will play a role in the works being produce. At least that’s the case for San Francisco-based artist Jim Campbell, who combines video and light with computers and custom electronics to create sculptural LED works. Over 20 of these works are on display at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens for Campbell’s first career-spanning New York museum retrospective.
One well-known work, “Exploded Views” (2011), features 2,880 seemingly random, flickering LED lights. When viewed from a particular vantage point, however, the work comes alive as various film scenes play. Other works include photographs that appear and fade away as fog covers a lens, mimicking the artist’s timed breaths for one hour, and “home movies” projected through self-created LED curtains. “Jim designs all of the circuitry for his works,” fellow tech artist Craig Dorety said of Campbell, “including the computers that run the artworks, so it’s totally custom from the ground-up—nothing off the shelf.”
Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception is on display at the Museum of Moving Image in Astoria until June 15.
5000 Moving Parts, MIT Museum
Don’t expect to see traditional artwork at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus museum. After all, it is one of the world’s leading tech and research universities. Exploring the work of six “kinetic” (works dependent on movement) artists, the exhibition 5000 Moving Parts puts motion to the test while combining art, science, history, and technology.
John Douglas Power’s large-scale sculpture “Ialu” pushes mounted sticks into graceful swaying motions through the use of a small motor, while projecting video of blue skies above them and amplifying the mechanical sounds made from the motion to create a seascape atmosphere. Arthur Ganson—in collaboration with sound artist Christina Campanella—creates a conceptual lung which mimics the meditative pace of breathing in “Machine With Breath.” And, Electro-Magnetic I, No. 13” by Greek artist Takis (the exhibition’s oldest piece, created in 1968) uses the power of magnets to levitate an orbital object.
5000 Moving Parts is on display at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts until November 30.
Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology, and Surgery, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
Stanford University, known for its medical center, is also home to a large collection of French sculptures by Auguste Rodin. Surprisingly, these two vastly different fields have collided to create the Cantor Arts Center’s most recent exhibition, Inside Rodin’s Hand: Art, Technology, and Surgery.
For years, Dr. James Chang has used the sculptural hands that Rodin created to teach undergraduate students surgical anatomy. Students study the hands to diagnose medical conditions, with the aid of technology of course. Three-dimensional scans of the sculptures are created revealing the bone, nerve and muscle structures that they would contain, even allowing virtual surgery. The exhibition that came out of Chang’s teaching process brings the classroom to the gallery space, allowing visitors to experience the unique form of education that meshes medicine, technology, and art.
“This exhibition brings together the best of Stanford with a cross-disciplinary set of contributors,” Cantor Director Connie Wolf said. “We were all inspired by Dr. Chang and his passion. Outstanding individuals from the anatomy department at the School of Medicine contributed unique, cutting-edge technology that is changing how surgery is taught throughout the world. At the Cantor, we offered our curatorial expertise, the renowned Rodin collection, and our commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. And the medical school’s Lane Library is lending important historical materials.”
Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology, and Surgery is on display at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in California until August 3.
Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, Museum of Arts and Design
Are you familiar with Computer Numerically Controlled marching? What about digital knitting? Surely three-dimensional printing, no? Well, you should probably learn about them now because they’re already defining our world. The most recent exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York explains how.
The works in the exhibition hit almost every category of creativity—fashion, textiles, furniture, architecture, sportswear, eveningwear, jewelry, and many more—with technology as its fundamental basis. Tamae Hirokawa’s seamless couture gowns are created through a process of whole-garment knitting—a digital procedure that ensures a perfect fit. Three-dimensional printing, a process that takes a digital model and builds it mechanically with layers (much like an ink jet printer), is displayed through the creation of Nike’s first 3-D printed shoe cleat plate.
The exhibition also allows visitors to interact with the many processes that created the works on display. The “hands-on” laboratory allows visitors to use some of the technology, including being three-dimensionally scanned and printed.
Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital was on display at MAD Museum in New York until June 1.
This content is partner content, and was not necessarily written or created by The Daily Beast editorial team.
Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
World News
06.07.14
Is North Korea Collecting American Hostages?
Detaining Americans may be the rogue state’s latest ploy to grab attention.
North Korea’s usual methods of getting attention have experienced diminishing returns, and it may have decided to start keeping hostages. To get them out, Washington might have to play Pyongyang’s game.
Little or nothing is known about Jeffrey Edward Fowle—if that is his real name. We do know, however, that North Korea has held nine Americans since 2009. Most have been released, but recently North Korea has begun keeping Americans.
North Korea currently holds two other Americans. Kenneth Bae, an American missionary of Korean descent, was detained in November 2012 for allegedly trying to bring down the government. Bae was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a work camp and is reported to be in deteriorating health.
Two months ago, Pyongyang said it had detained Matthew Todd Miller, for “a gross violation of its legal order.” Little is known about Miller, who, according to North Korea, reportedly tore up his visa and demanded asylum.
Most countries would simply deport foreigners and be done with it. Not North Korea. Robert Kelly, associate professor for political Science and diplomacy at South Korea’s Busan University, told The Daily Beast, “North Korea has a history of extraordinarily unconventional bargaining tactics. It violates the most basic norms of international relations to pursue advantage, which is a major reason why North Korea is considered so dangerous.”
“There are many disturbing dictatorships in the world,” Kelly said, “but few that disregard even the basic elements of diplomacy, such as not kidnapping foreign civilians.”The leadership knows that war means the end of the regime. The lack of escalation makes the attacks easier for the South Koreans and Americans to shrug off.
What advantage does North Korea seek in keeping American citizens?
North Korea casts itself as a revolutionary state. Like all revolutionary governments, it has to keep the revolution going in order to stay in power—and help explain the country’s dire economic state. A key part of that is designating an enemy of the revolution and for North Korea, that enemy is the United States.
But enemies of the revolution have to look engaged to be credible, and these days it’s been difficult to get the Americans’ attention. Washington has been preoccupied with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade and has been dead set against having to juggle a third crisis.
North Korea has repeatedly tried to provoke South Korea—and by extension the U.S.—into a political crisis. The recent sinking of a South Korea navy ship by a North Korean submarine, the shelling of the South’s Yeongpyeong Island, and the artillery attack on a South Korean navy ship on May 22nd all garnered the country attention.
At the same time, however, the pattern has made the North Korean leadership predictable. The North Korean leadership makes one attack and stands down; the country cannot afford to let these situations grow out of control. The leadership knows that war means the end of the regime. The lack of escalation makes the attacks easier for the South Koreans and Americans to shrug off.
Washington, in particular, has been loath to do anything that might escalate. In his memoirs, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recalled dissuading South Korea from heavy retaliation after the 2011 Yeongpyeong Island incident. While officials in Seoul wanted to strike back harder than it ultimately did, the Pentagon stepped in to prevent any strikes that could escalate matters.
Now, with the war in Iraq over and the war in Afghanistan winding down, the U.S. has announced its return to Asia with the so-called Asian Pivot. To North Korea’s disappointment, this has little to do with North Korea and everything to do with a rising China.
Detaining Americans is a low-risk way for North Korea to get America’s attention. America is not going to risk a military confrontation over a handful of citizens, but it can’t ignore their plight, either.
What would get the Americans freed? It’s hard to say, because we don’t know what the North Koreans want. Visits by former U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, however, have resulted in the release of several Americans, including Aijalon Mali Gomes and the journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. North Korea was satisfied that an American president came to Pyongyang, hat in hand.
At other times, North Korea might want aid economic and food concessions, especially during periods of hardship and famine. But, Robert Kelly warns, they will not give something for nothing. “They are canny negotiators,” Kelly said, “Nothing is ever done in good will. If they can trade [an American] for something, they will.”
That may be the entire point.
Pool photo by Alain Jocard
World News
06.06.14
What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration
After
the president delivered his long speech and before he finally talked to
Putin in Normandy, he was stopped on live television by a bent old
soldier who gave Obama a piece of his mind.
Was the infirm old soldier, perhaps, taking Obama to task for the scandals in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs? Was he telling the president that American policy needed more spine? An old survivor has a kind of license to say whatever he wants, even to the president of the United States. Obama smiled warmly. But then, in front of the crowd and the world’s television cameras, he would. None of us in the crowd could hear.
Obama had given a long speech on what would be a very long day commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Longest Day, the Allied landings in Normandy that began the final, successful push to crush the Nazi Reich.
At another ceremony in the afternoon near the strand the British forces had called Sword Beach, the heads of 19 governments gathered for the commemoration, and the world watched for body language among them that might hint at the resolution, or worsening, of today’s conflicts, especially in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was there. He could not fail to be invited to such a momentous event, given that his country had helped win the war, losing tens of millions of people in the effort.
In public, he and Obama circled each other warily, mostly pretending to be too busy talking to someone else—in Obama’s case, Queen Elizabeth—to pay attention to each other.
But then the television feed broadcast around the world, and projected on enormous screens in Normandy, appeared to show the two men glancing at each other from a distance with challenging smiles, like rivals on a playing field. Earlier, they had met on the sidelines of the formal luncheon for about 15 minutes, but the readout from both camps revealed little about what really was said, or not. It all appeared to be about atmospherics.
Putin, adroit as ever, had made absolutely sure he’d be the focus of Friday’s media frenzy with an interview he gave to French television earlier in the week. He flouted so many conventions of what the West regards as good taste that he seemed to be angling for a role as Dr. Evil. (“All he needs is a white cat” is a current cliché, although not yet a trend.)
When Putin talked about Hillary Clinton, for instance, he got especially ugly. Had she likened Russian action in Ukraine to the Nazi Anschluss? “It’s better not to argue with women,” Putin said, according to a Russian-to-French translation by AFP. “But Madame Clinton has never been very elegant in her statements.”When the ceremony was over, I made my way through the arrays of marble crosses to the stage and to the man in the blue hat who had taken Obama’s hand.
In addition to Putin’s meeting with Obama, his other headline-making encounter on Friday was with Ukrainian President-elect Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire often called “The Chocolate King” because he built his fortune manufacturing candies. The brief get-together was brokered by French President Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But D-Day diplomacy notwithstanding, by all indications the violence in eastern Ukraine is getting worse, not better, and it continues to serve the Kremlin’s apparent ends.
Indeed, one sign of the contempt that Putin and his circle feel for Obama and his circle is a headline that ran in the Russian daily Izvestia about Obama’s sit-down with Poroshenko earlier in the week: “The Meeting of Two Chocolate Presidents,” it said.
French national security analyst François Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris was watching all this closely from the sidelines and says some of his worst fears about the decline of American power are being confirmed.
Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel have been “running around the world trying to reassure us” that the United States will honor its military commitments, said Heisbourg, and that it is prepared to use force as a vital tool of policy.
But at least since the crisis over Syria’s chemical weapons last August and September, that crucial credibility is gone. While Obama achieved the narrow goal he wanted in Syria—neutralizing the chemical arsenal—his clumsy back and forth with Congress played out in such a way that the world understood that neither he nor the American people were willing to engage in new fights in far corners of the world.
So as Obama spoke about the price of defending freedom with a massive military action like the Allied effort in World War II, the rhetoric must have seemed, to many of those old men listening, more than a little hollow. The only really enthusiastic ovation at Colleville-sur-mer was when Obama turned to the veterans on the stage and said, “Gentlemen, we are truly humbled by your presence here today.” After all, they had seen so much, survived so much, and understood so well the real and terrible experience of combat. They may have been afraid, and in most cases no doubt were, but their fears did not paralyze them.
When the ceremony was over, I made my way through the arrays of marble crosses to the stage and to the man in the blue hat who had taken Obama’s hand.
His name, it turns out, is Irving Smolens, and he was only 19 when he took part in the Normandy landing. Afterward he spent much of his life as a buyer of women’s and children’s clothing in Massachusetts, leading a quiet, peaceful life with his family.
“What did you say to Obama?” I asked him.
“I thanked him for keeping us out of war,” said Smolens.
—With Tracy McNicoll in Paris
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