‘A modern-day Greek tragedy’: the life and death of artist Thomas Kinkade

Director Miranda Yousef: ‘The film is about how denying yourself full self-expression will destroy you'.’ Photograph: Tremolo

Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade’s brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire’s best-known faces in fantastical landscapes.

Still, this is but a shadow of the massive, multimedia Kinkade operation that reportedly netted over $2bn in total retail sales in 2004, licensing its images to everything from plates to calendars to greeting cards to actual Thomas Kinkade cottages that fans could live in. If you happened to be a sentient human being during the 1990s and 2000s, chances are you have at least some cultural memory of this artist who was as ubiquitous as could be. (Kinkade was fond of bragging that he reached the heights of everywhereness that Andy Warhol could only dream of.)