After six dark years battling the “Painter of Light,” the owner of the now defunct Thomas Kinkade gallery on the Downtown Mall, may be seeing the light– and money– at the end of the tunnel. On June 17, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California restored a 2006 arbitration order that Kinkade’s company pay Jeff Spinello and his former partner and wife Karen Hazlewood $2.1 million. The order had been overturned by a federal judge in San Francisco in 2007. Among Spinello’s complaints: that Kinkade’s company, Media Arts Group, was undermining galleries by selling his works at discount store Tuesday Morning and on QVC, and that Kinkade himself was no longer painting his own works. Kinkade representatives have denied the allegations.

Write a letter to the editor