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Kinkade and a college friend spent a summer traveling around the country, sketching scenery and collaborating on The Artist's Guide to Sketching, which became a best-selling instructional book. The success of the book led to a stint in film animation, and Kinkade learned more about the effects of light. After the release of the film, Fire and Ice, Kinkade decided to devote his professional efforts to creating and marketing his own art.

About the same time, in 1982, he married Nanette, his childhood sweetheart.

Kinkade published his first print, Main Street at Dusk—Placerville, an idyllic rendering of his hometown, in 1984. Five years later he and a friend, Ken Raasch, founded Lightpost Publishing, which went public in 1994 as Media Arts Group Inc.

In 1995 he was named artist of the year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers, and for the ensuing three years Kinkade was designated graphic artist of the year by the same organization. In 1999 he was voted into U.S. Art magazine's hall of fame.

"My paintings are halfway between a memory and a daydream," Kinkade says in his spacious studio in a coastal mountain setting in northern California. "I try to produce a re-creation of the past without the hard edges." The studio, awash in sunlight, has a huge, vaulted ceiling and a massive stone fireplace. "I wanted a place that felt like Yosemite," he explains, "and I needed a big space because I'm working on some big paintings."

Kinkade himself is a large man, expansive and eager to talk about his work and his faith. "My whole ministry is an expression of Matthew 5:16: 'Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven,' " Kinkade says.

Kinkade calls himself the "Painter of Light" because of his Christian convictions. "Light is what we're attracted to," he says. "This world is very dark, but in heaven there is no darkness."

Fresh from an early-afternoon jog and a shower, he sits on the edge of the fireplace, hunched forward, sipping from a glass of sparkling water. "Paintings are the tools that can inspire the heart to greater faith," Kinkade says. "My paintings are messengers of God's love. Nature is simply the language which I speak."

Indeed, most of Kinkade's art, including the work in progress at the other end of the room, depicts the natural world. Some of his paintings are representations of specific places, but most are composites of various scenes, images from the artist's head.

"The ideas come out of nowhere," he says, and some of the inspirations come from sketches he makes while sitting in church. Sometimes people will see a painting and tell him, "Yes, I've been there," and then provide the name of a mountain range. "I have to correct them," Kinkade says, "and admit that I made it up. I call them the Kinkade Mountains!"

With the practiced ease of an insurance agent listing his products, Kinkade ticks off the themes that animate his art: home, family, faith in God, the beauty of nature, celebration of romantic moments, a simpler way of living.

"I love to create beautiful worlds where light dances and peace reigns," Kinkade says. "I like to portray a world without the Fall."

With its plush, dark carpeting and incandescent lighting, the reception area for Kinkade's publishing house and warehouse looks like a living room in an upper-middle-class suburban home. "Lightpost Publishing," the receptionist chirps into the phone. "Thank you for sharing the light."

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14