So says the L.A. Times, although, as my taste in art run more towards Kandinsky, Bosch or Bacon, I can't say that I was previously familiar with Thomas Kinkade, the self-professed Painter of Light, who several years ago leveraged some artistic talent and a religious conversion in to a treacly empire.

Here's a sample of his work:



Nice.

But not so nice is Kinkade, according to former associates and owners of Kinkade-exclusive galleries, who claim that that they were pressured to expand rapidly, and prodded into opening multiple locations in a small geographic area. Later, they claim that Kinkade tanked his public company in order to take it back private on the cheap. Then there are the drunken disorderly charges of sexual harrassment and peeing on Winnie the Poo at Disneyland.

You can't make this stuff up.

Read on here and here.

-- MDT