drunken downfall of beloved artist thomas kinkade

[Tansy_Gold]

179. No, it's not nonsense.

As a writer and a writing teacher, I fully understand the difference between Art with a Capital A and technical skill. I'm not sure that you do.

Technical skill in writing -- knowing exactly which word to use and how to use it -- can dramatically help a writer to tell a story. I do everything short of browbeat my students to learn how to use the language properly. It is their primary tool for telling their stories, and the better they are with that tool, the better their writing and their stories will be.

But no amount of technical skill can make up for lack of creative spirit, lack of artistic vision, lack of imagination and soul, emotion, passion. Sometimes the perfection of technical skill destroys the Art with a Capital A.

Hunter's painting technique may not be the same as Kinkade's, but she has much more creative spirit, and that's the whole difference.

Kinkade's works spoke to an audience that, in many ways, took comfort in the comfortable and familiar, an audience that didn't want to think, didn't really even want to feel. So they weren't asked to imagine much of anything in his . . . art. It was all there for them, in all its impossibilities and shining lights and foggy neoned colors. He told them what they were supposed to feel, not how he felt. He was selling them a product, not expressing himself.

Technique is not all there is to art. Not by a long shot.