A California artist who made a name for himself as “the Painter of Light” with his depictions of cottages and peaceful landscapes died in his Bay Area home Friday. Kinkade called himself America’s most-collected artist, and the sale of his paintings and other products is reported to generate a staggering $100 million a year in sales—although Kinkade was never a darling of the critical establishment. But that didn’t matter much to an artist who once told an interviewer that he would simply “really like to make people happy.”
Read it at San Francisco Chronicle