Kinkade's world of parody

Thomas Kinkade, the self-anointed Painter of Light™, and artist behind the once-profitable later-fraudulent Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries enterprise, died unexpectedly on Friday of natural causes.  Kinkade’s appeal to his fans, as Laura Miller wrote on Salon today, is in its “aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort” – the same things that make his work a giant, glaring bull’s-eye for parody. On dozens of websites, artists and Photoshop dabblers have taken Kinkade’s images of glowing, pastoral peace and added … we’ll call them contradictory splashes. We've put together a slide show of some of the most memorable.