Non-Fiction
Beyond Paradise / Surya Milner
Image courtesy of the author.
Some say that those who attempt to recreate heaven on earth are doomed to fail. I’m inclined to believe them, though from my vantage point, surveying the landscape of light, it’s not so clear cut. I still marvel at the quiet splendor of it all: sun-dappled trees at the onset of autumn; stoic, icy peaks, a shallow creek at dusk.
There are goslings warming under the wings of their kin, and in the shadow of the pines there lies a dog in wait, looking upon, as I am, the bed of the brook and all that converges in the foreground: clear water, a blue-grey sky, the warm glow of nature, untouched.
It looks like the end of the perfect day, and that’s what it’s called, in the painting where the image lives, within a frame on a wall in my parents’ home.
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Thomas Kinkade made paintings for people who like to hang their values on their walls: the “beauty of nature,” mostly, but also ideals like faith, family, home, tranquility, joy, hope. His work was gimmicky and prolific; the establishment art world disdained his simplistic renderings of American utopias—almost always devoid of faces, preferring the ambiguous warmth of a sunset, say, over the complications of real people.
Growing up, I reified the places of Kinkade’s paintings the way I did my parents’ marriage. He was a product of Christianity, the white kind. His work reflected my parents’ spiritual preoccupation with renewal and salvation. They did not look like him, but his landscapes spoke to a similar romantic American ideal, consummated by a commitment to eternity, to God.
My mother left Mumbai at 24 for the American southwest by way of Illinois, where she passed time picking cotton on the side of the highway to eventually map its genome. She didn’t believe in God then, neither the one back home in India nor the animus of churches here; but then, she met my dad. Then came my brother and then me. By the time they moved to Texas, they were going to church most Sundays and celebrating their anniversaries with an annual trip to a tiny town called Salado, where they always made a stop at the Thomas Kinkade gallery, often returning with an original.
In suburban Texas, resplendent nature is akin to a fantasy; it’s the stuff of car rides north, to places like Colorado or New Mexico. We took many of those car rides all over the American west until one day, somewhere in southwestern Montana, my parents stopped the Honda Odyssey and planted a stake by a wide river in a very wide valley, where cream-colored grassland stopped only for the rise and fall of deep blue mountains, looming large. They introduced this place to us, their children, as home.
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Perhaps many adolescents define themselves by what they are not. I was not white, not like the kids I went to school with in Texas, anyway; I was not a believer of the same God really, because the other girls at Sunday school were all blonde, and suburban-wealthy, and had mothers who scheduled things like playdates and cotillion practice. And yet we coexisted in the same cookie-cutter community of suburban Texas, that of Jesus Christ and Thomas Kinkade, and as a tomboy I could blend in with the boys, usually, which in turn gave me credence with the girls.
In the wilderness of Montana, though, there were few people against whom I could define myself. I took to the trails; I began to hike, mostly for the great sense of peace that came with proximity to the rocks, the pines, the sky. The landscape was oblivious to my feelings about it, or my feelings about anything, really. I remember that first summer: standing on a rock-covered ledge, allowing a midsummer hail to pelt my face, and knowing that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I could do in my power to stop it. It was a force greater than I, and by the same token, it did not entertain the same frivolous considerations that plagued me—about my hair, my skin, and the sense of belonging that was predicated on those two.
To view nature is to see the face of God. It’s a phrase I hear often in the corridors of my mind. I can’t place its origins, nor author, just the all-consuming feeling that it is true. Real-life vistas are truer than image; its details facts amongst otherwise abstract concepts of belonging, creation, rebirth. When I stopped calling Texas home in favor of Montana, many memories from the Lone Star State receded. But still I couldn’t square the Kinkade paintings from my childhood—my earliest ideas of nature, and Christianity, and whiteness—with nature as it truly was: aesthetic beauty without commercial distortions, pre-made filters, or social hierarchy.
In the world of Thomas Kinkade, nature is a landscape upon which we are free to imagine ourselves. His paintings render American imperialist readings of land without people, their families, or cultures; his was a brand of nature that panders to the market of collective belonging and emotional subjectivity. And yet I found myself drawn to the idea that a single landscape could wither the societal ills that long beset me: how to embody whiteness and brownness at the same time, for one; and to what extent this line of questioning was even necessary when, as I discovered in Absaroka wilderness, there were wild places indifferent to both.
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I long resented the Kinkade paintings that hung in my family’s house, for they struck me as symbolic of that sweet and tortuous collaboration between Christianity and whiteness that I reveled in defining myself against. In time, I stopped faulting my parents for purchasing such commercialized and pseudo-religious paintings—my dad was an engineer and largely oblivious to aesthetics; my mother a biologist from India who, while also immune to aesthetics, was a ready consumer of objects that reflected her abiding belief in the American dream.
But I never forgot them, those paintings. In another of his that adorns my parents’ wall, there’s a mansion seated beyond a spring garden, which blooms in ethereal brilliance. “All of us, I believe, carry a memory of Eden,” reads the painting’s description. “When I came upon the blooming Spring Gate,” the narrator continues, “I accepted its invitation to explore—partly to satisfy a secret longing for the splendid gardens I expected to discover within. And, since this is a locale of the imagination, I haven’t been disappointed… What could possibly be closer to paradise?”
The painting is an invitation to a place that doesn’t exist, a “locale of the imagination” that might spur the cultivation of an abundant inner life.
But this vision is, like all images, a rendering: Kinkade’s manifestation of paradise. When he died, his commercial art empire collapsed under the strain of such aspiration; marred by his addiction, the heavenly utopias he painted were cast in a different light. Long after I walked away from the specific strain of Christian religiosity in which I was raised, the lessons of Kinkade dawned on me.
I, too, had been viewing nature—that outside my window, or on a mountaintop at dusk—through the lens of paradise. The landscape didn’t carry twisted notions of religion and race, though it had allowed both to settle here. While I had internally chastised Kinkade’s work for its pandering to white evangelicals, I was attracted to the same glint of absolution in my own conception of nature: that among it, I was the only one; that, because the land does not have the capacity to carry hate, I could walk freely.
Kinkade’s landscapes, however gaudy, became a portal into my desires as they actually are, despite how repellant they may be. His artifice is one of aspiration and renewal, without which we, too, can hardly bear to be in the outdoors.
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There’s a garden that grows outside of my house now. It foregrounds the jagged blue mountains that outline the stretch of land known as Paradise in this region of Montana I call home. Roses bloom in dense thickets that collect bumblebees, some the size of my eyes. Lupine, planted years ago, has leapt the fence and made its way onto the road. The dirt is crowded with monstrous thistles.
Inside, there are no Kinkade paintings, just windows, and through them I can see clearly: this small community cradled by blue-green mountains; the river, still wide, the pulse of the place; the outline of my figure overlaid upon the rest. This place grows wild, unruly, and I let it. For it is not Eden—though if we’re judging by appearances, it looks like it could be.