Thomas Kinkade Pulls a Jackson Pollock

Thomas Kinkade, America's trademarked "painter of light," is best known for his Christian-themed work that sells like nobody's business. His popularity has even spawned furniture lines and he's said, "When I got saved, God became my art agent." According a lawsuit filed by former gallery owners, ex-employees, and the like, the Kink is acting less like a true believer and more like serial pisser Jackson Pollock:

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.

LA Times story here. Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Reason's Charles Paul Freund investigated Kinkade's lucrative cultural niche here.