In the world according to Thomas Kinkade, life is simple, picturesque. Cozy cottages always glow with inviting light, flowers of all varieties always bloom in improbable synchronicity, the sun always breaks through storm clouds, promising hope and happiness and har-mony. Always.

In Kinkadia, as in the incredibly popular paintings he produces, there are no angry slashes of emotion, no moral ambiguities, no overly cluttered lives. Always, though, there is a confounding of fantasy and realism, of light and darkness, a sense of childlike confidence in mankind and nature. And, of course, there are products. A multitude of products. From sofas to screen savers to soap, an abundance of material objects conjure Kinkade's never-never land.

Two hundred signature galleries and thousands of stores carry reproduced paintings, mugs, tapestries, stationery, serving trays. With 80,000 QVC clients, Kinkade is one of the home shopping network's top five collectible lines, up there with Marie Osmond dolls and the cuddly Boyds Bears Collection. Admirers can visit the Thomas Kinkade National Archive in Monterey, Calif., or flag down one of two mobile Kinkade museums that crisscross the country. They can lose themselves in the serene music his work has inspired one pianist to record, watch KinkadeScapes -- video meanderings through his paintings -- or study the soothing philosophy espoused in his numerous books.

For Kinkade, 41, who has taken the middlebrow art market by storm in the last decade, it's just a beginning, says Raymond A. Peterson, CEO of Media Arts Group Inc., the company that markets the California-based artist. Never mind those elites who may dismiss him as a fraud, who don't understand or even belittle his mission: to bless others with his work, to remind them "that there are still good things in this world, that tranquillity and beauty are still available."

The Kinkade "lifestyle brand," Peterson says, has infinite potential. A home store, like Crate & Barrel, is not inconceivable, nor are housing developments, novels, television specials or a movie studio based on Kinkade imagery.

"When you think about Walt Disney, he started with the mouse and just started building on that," says Peterson. If Disney could leverage a rodent into an entertainment empire, why can't Kinkade leverage his fairy-tale cottages into a kingdom?

"Thom's got huge vision," Peterson says. "Thom's vision is scary."

Every Thomas Kinkade catalog, calendar and newspaper ad carries the trademarked phrase "Painter of Light." It's a reference to Kinkade's self-identification with the 19th-century Hudson River School, a group of artists whose dazzling lighting techniques praised God and the American doctrine of manifest destiny. It's also a reminder to would-be buyers of the mass-produced artist's signature effect -- the sunbeams, lamps and windows in the reproductions of his paintings that, thanks to an innovative lithographic process, appear to glow when room lights are dimmed.

But for all his success and acclaim, little light has been shed on the Painter of Light himself. Kinkade lives in zealously guarded privacy. The personal tales he shares with admirers help to sell pictures, but his sunny self-help adages concerning service and family and God reveal little about the man behind them.

Though he's been a force in the world of "mall art" for nearly a decade, I first heard of Thomas Kinkade only last year, when a promotional blitz announced a new Kinkade gallery in Harborplace. How, I wondered as I studied the advertising, could I have missed the millennium's answer to Michelangelo, a man described as "one of the most successful painters of the 20th century?"

On the March day when Kinkade's much-anticipated "Carmel Sunset on Ocean Avenue" ($1,260 for a framed canvas lithograph) is released, I go to Harborplace in search of clues to the Kinkade phenomenon.

The gallery, its walls carpeted in clubby forest green and dimly lighted, is bustling with visitors. The featured lithograph, a large, rain-streaked streetscape of the oceanside California town of Carmel, hangs above a mantelpiece. It has many of Kinkade's characteristic touches: vintage cars, people in clothing of different eras, a plucky pooch, a cameo of the artist himself at his easel. Several "N's" have been hidden in the artwork in tribute to his wife, Nanette. And when the lighting is dimmed, the sun appears to radiate from behind the clouds -- the effect Kinkade's company has termed "luminous lithography."

In Kinkade galleries, reproductions vary in price from $15 for a simple calendar to $300 for a Masonite-backed lithograph to $15,000 and up for "canvas transfer reproductions" signed and personally highlighted by the artist. (On the secondary market, an increasingly rare Kinkade original can bring $500,000 these days. In Kinkadia, there's a price point for everyone, including Microsoft chief Bill Gates, said to own a Kinkade.)

Its synergize-and-conquer marketing strategy has made Kinkade's Media Arts one of the nation's top art publishers. In fiscal year 1998, it generated $82.7 million in revenues. In fiscal '99, revenues leapt 53 percent to $126.3 million. Net income grew by 50 percent to $18.4 million.

Harborplace gallery manager James Gillen (since departed to open a Kinkade gallery in Chicago) knows these numbers make it a seller's market in Kinkadia. So he pleasantly explains to customer Michael Hayek that he cannot possibly accept less than list price for "Carmel Sunset."

Hayek, an importer-exporter, tells Gillen he would like to ship this wondrous piece home to Ecuador, display it over his own mantelpiece, install a dimmer switch and work Kinkade's luminous magic for others. His guests would be so enthused, he could start his own business selling Kinkades.

Gillen, politely, doesn't budge.

In another room, Carol and Jectofer Ramirez of Sterling, Va., both 32, snuggle on a couch as Gillen works the dimmer switch. "Look at the lightposts, honey," wife says to husband. The couple already own Kinkade's "Mountain Chapel." Now they're deliberating an investment in "Lamplight Village."

But Richard Wittmer doesn't hesitate. He has just purchased "Light of Peace," a lithograph of a lighthouse shining above a turbulent sea. The scene has haunted him since he first saw it. He is sure, he says, this will be the first of many Kinkade purchases.

Placerville is a historic town 40 miles east of Sacramento in California's Gold Rush country. First called Dry Diggin's, and then Hangtown (for all the men put to death here), Placerville was a crossroads for hundreds of thousands of prospectors seeking their fortunes in the Mother Lode.

I've come here because Placerville is at the heart of the Kinkade mythos. The artist grew up here, and he speaks often of its small-town charms, of his beloved high school English teacher, Gordon Purdy, of his formative sketching expeditions into the surrounding wilderness. He also speaks of his broken family, poverty, the house with no lawn. This chiaroscuro childhood, split between American idyll and nightmare, forged his gift, Kinkade has said.

The artist is well-known here, if not well-loved by all. Andy Gilles-pie, scraggly proprietor of the Sierra Consignment Co., readily voices his impression of Kinkade, who he says occasionally glides through town in a limousine.

"I paint the schlock the whole world loves ..." he bellows, mimicking crooner Barry Manilow.

Jim Webb, a Kinkade acquaintance and publisher of the Mountain Democrat, the local newspaper, says some here resent Kinkade's success and believe he has turned his back on the town. Webb disagrees. "I look at it as sour grapes," he says.

As far as he has ventured commercially, Kinkade still anchors his hometown's Main Street. At the nation's first Thomas Kinkade Gallery, George Carpenter and a staff of 14 sell 2,500 Kinkade canvas transfers annually. On a typical Saturday, perhaps 200 Kinkade pilgrims will visit the gallery, then search for the exquisite Victorians he has re-created in his work.

It was 12 years ago, when Thom and Nanette Kinkade were running a modest print publishing business here, that Carpenter agreed to show a few Kinkade landscapes in a gallery above his gift shop. Today, he is credited in Kinkade lore with formulating the "concept of dedicated retail" that helped Kinkade strike his own Mother Lode.

In 1990, Kinkade and entrepreneur Kenneth E. Raasch formed Media Arts Group Inc., a name chosen for its biblical acronym -- MAGI. Soon, with the adoption of the "canvas transfer" process, the holy trinity of Kinkade marketing -- dedicate, duplicate and dominate -- clicked into place.

Like all Kinkade dealers, Carpenter is fluent in the subtleties of the peculiar MAGI economy, a system where, in a perfectly pitched imitation of fine art sensibilities, a print can accrue in value according to whether Kinkade has signed or retouched it. (Specially trained "master highlighters" also retouch the canvases at gallery promotions -- adding color at the buyer's instruction.)

The controlled release of limited editions from MAGI's stock of Kinkade images also has helped spawn a torrid supply-and-demand market, not unlike that built around Beanie Babies toys. For example, the 935 prints of "Carmel, Ocean Avenue" issued in 1989 cost $595 each. Now each is worth between $4,550 and $6,225, according to the Collector's Information Bureau in Illinois.

"We suggest people look at [a Kinkade] as a mutual fund," Carpenter says. Some will appreciate slowly, "and some go right through the roof."

While Kinkade's personal dab of paint may be worth thousands of dollars to his collectors, art experts say his paintings would in all probability be worthless in a gallery or auction appealing to more diverse tastes. Nor, they say, is there any guarantee that Kinkade reproductions will continue to climb in value even within his market.

But there's no way the bottom will fall out, Carpenter says -- do the math. There are 60 million homes in the country, and probably not one in 1,000 has a Kinkade painting -- yet.

But perhaps all these numbers are beside the point.

"We don't sell paintings here," Carpenter says. "We just tell what we call 'The Thom Story.'"

"The Thom Story" is in part Kinkade's rags-to-riches saga. But it's also Kinkade's spiritual journey, a narrative that hits the mainstream bull's-eye.

Kinkade speaks of his "servant-centered" heart, his romantic disposition and his deliberate retreat from popular culture in folksy terms permeated with Christian platitudes. His philosophy, a consummate California blend of reactionary self-sufficiency and New Age "follow your bliss" idealism, sells like hot cakes in the heartland.

In books like "Simpler Times" and "Lightposts for Living: The Art of Choosing a Joyful Life," Kinkade frames his art in a mythic, pastoral past where people fly kites, bake pies and play checkers -- and to which everyone is urged to return.

If anyone has found a present that lives up to this illusory past, it's Kinkade himself. This self-styled "servant" owns 24 percent of his company's publicly traded stock. His good fortune -- a home and studio in northern California's Santa Cruz mountains, lovely family, international adventures -- is a key element in Media Arts' advertising. Like Martha Stewart, Kinkade himself has become a "lifestyle brand," someone whose public persona is inseparable from his company's products and profits.

This evening, in a television studio a few hours southwest of Placerville, I will hear "The Thom Story" invoked repeatedly during a live, three-hour broadcast on the QVC shopping network. And, finally, I will hear "The Thom Story" from the Painter of Light himself.

As I arrive, Kinkade collectors already are queued up outside the studio, hoping to glimpse the artist before he enters the set. Inside, Tom Howard, a Nashville-based composer with jet-black goatee and Svengali eyes, warms up on a Yamaha grand. He has the distinction of being the first musician to record on a Kinkade music label.

He began, he explains, by putting "10 of Thom's prints ... right on the piano, and started dreaming and composing." The result was "Reflections of Light," music as easy on the ears as a babbling brook. Two more CDs have followed. "It's been a great fit," Howard says. "I have a real affinity for what Thom is trying to accomplish in the culture."

Shortly before show time, the featured guest arrives. He's a burly, gregarious guy in jeans and a well-cut blazer. His hair, once unruly, has been moussed into submission. He gobbles pizza, then chats hurriedly while a makeup artist burnishes his tan.

"I just got back from Guatemala ... trying to rescue some children," he says. Kinkade is working with World Vision, a Christian relief group planning a mission on the edge of a landfill where destitute people live. "You're talking 6-month-old babies with newspapers for diapers. You should see these kids. They'll break your heart," he says.

As we talk, Kinkade says little that I haven't already read or heard. Occasionally, though, a more mischievous Kinkade peers from behind the official mask, the one who enjoyed motorcycle sprees, railcar-hopping adventures and other risky outings that contrast starkly with the sedate life extolled in his paintings and books. But for the most part, he offers rote recitations about faith, family and good deeds.

He recounts, for instance, a much-told story about the epiphany he had while studying art at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s, when he realized the spiritual bankruptcy of modernism.

Oozing sarcasm, Kinkade trashes the defiant credos of artists like Picasso and Dali, in his mind selfish humans without a whit of civic consciousness. "The cultural luminaries we call artists," he says with disgust.

Kinkade says he rejected his teachers' ideas, found God, and soon found his calling as an altruistic artist bestowing hope, joy and happiness. "Unlike books or movies or a piece of music, which can touch your heart and pretty soon you forget about it, a painting is forever."

On the air, while Kinkade praises the Lord, QVC host Lisa Mason pushes the products. "If you love Impressionism, this is the painting for you!" she says of one of Kinkade's "plein airs" -- a series of quickly wrought street scenes and landscapes. As the more costly luminous lithographs come up for sale, the artist pays them the ultimate compliment in the Kinkade firmament: They are, he says, "as close as you can come to an original painting."

Joyce Olszewski, a Kinkade acolyte from San Jose, is invited to tell fellow audience members about her "Kinkade room" at home, where she goes "when I'm absolutely stressed out and unhappy." There, she says, she can "take from the light" shining from her nine Kinkade paintings. (Olszewski then ducks out early to get to the phone in her car. There's a print for sale that she simply must call in and buy -- using her Thomas Kinkade credit card.)

After the show, audience members linger to talk with their hero. One tells Kinkade his paintings got him through his divorce. Another asks to see more horses in his paintings (Kinkade keeps a file of images of favorite cars, cats, even a set of triplets sent to him by admirers who hope he'll use them in his work).

These collectors aren't alone in wanting to fuse their lives with his art. The same can be said for companies, like QVC, that seek strategic licensing deals with Kinkade. Avon, Hallmark and the Bradford Exchange all have done so with rousing success. Soon, as part of an agreement with MAGI, U.S. Homes Corp. will build a Kinkade-inspired model home outside Sacramento, possibly a prototype for a Kinkade-style subdivision. Not a stretch when you realize that La-Z-Boy has already produced Thomas Kinkade-signature chairs, sofas, chests and armoires to outfit such homes.

On this TV set replica of one of his galleries, encircled by adoring fans, Kinkade suddenly calls to mind the very artists he claims to revile. He is a kind of conservative Andy Warhol, a self-promoting artist/celebrity/entrepreneur who has blurred the line between high and low art with unrelenting repetition. But instead of playing the iconoclast, Kinkade has fashioned himself into an easy-listening mystic. Instead of taunting the masses with challenging art, Kinkade offers a safe haven for those who might feel ill-at-ease in an edgy gallery.

As Kinkadia pioneer George Carpenter puts it, given a choice between a $5,000 Kinkade copy and a $5,000 original by another artist, why settle for what you don't like?

So far, I have learned a lot about Kinkade the icon, but little about Kinkade the man. Maybe if I caught a glimpse of his life outside the camera's eye, a true portrait of the artist -- the man who works in a studio next to his home, plays with his girls and eats his stay- at-home wife's meals -- would emerge. The next day, I set out in search of Kinkade's home base, a well-kept company secret.

First, though, I detour south to the Monterey Peninsula, where no fewer than seven Kinkade galleries are clustered in a tiny stretch of the central California coast. Among them is the Thomas Kinkade National Archive in Monterey. Despite what its name suggests, almost everything on view is for sale. Opened to sell Kinkade originals, the archive's mission changed after Media Arts opted to keep his actual paintings and sketches in its vault.

The archive also serves as a shrine. In a "historical room," Kinkade's woodsman's jacket is displayed. Plaques and vintage photographs, notably one of Kinkade as a shaggy-haired, wistful-looking youth, fill a wall.

Within the next year, says Rick Barnett, Media Arts vice president of retail operations, he expects to open a Kinkade museum, also in Monterey, with $10 million to $20 million worth of originals on display.

Kinkade is exceptional in that he can paint like an Impressionist, like a Luminist and like a Romantic, says Barnett as he points to different works. "He scans the breadth of all artistry, and you see such incredible sketching talent."

Some 70 miles away, over a precipitous mountain pass traveled by weekend motorcycle gangs, aging hippies and Silicon Valley fat cats, lies affluent Saratoga, an upscale suburb that has the feel of a Western town rendered into a yuppie mirage. This, according to a tip from a Kinkade aficionado, is as close as I can get to Kinkade's home in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

But as I scout for clues to his exact whereabouts, it becomes clear that Thomas Kinkade is not exactly a household name here. The folks at the little bakery don't know much about him. At the International Coffee Exchange, an employee says that someone's sister's brother-in-law works at Media Arts, but that's about it. The Painter of Light, apparently, is not that big a deal, not when the head of Internet giant 3Com stops in for coffee now and then.

So here I am, at the end of the Kinkadian rainbow, no closer to knowing Kinkade's muse than when I began. His world, at least as I've encountered it, is as impossible to enter as one of his make-believe cottages. I decide to retrace my steps, flip through my notes and search for an answer in the obvious place: Placerville.

It's a shimmering spring day and flowers bloom in profusion when I visit Gordon Purdy, the former high school English teacher whom Kinkade calls his hero.

At the door to his small apartment around the corner from the high school where he taught for decades, Purdy greets me dressed in shirt, slacks and a red bathrobe. At 78, he is ill and can eat little, he says. Everything tastes bitter to him, even a Popsicle. He thinks he may be dying.

Thom's "putting on too much weight; you can tell him I said that," he scolds.

But the teacher has fond memories of his former student, who once likened him to God in an amusing caricature.

Kinkade, he says, was a hellion who used to "drive the librarian crazy" by moving books around, a kid with "independence and spark." As his teacher, Purdy introduced Kinkade to the Romantic poets, taught him how they tried to transform an ugly world with beautiful images. He also shared with a young Kinkade his love of all things British, an influence he sees now in the artist's idealized works. One of them, "Placerville Victorian Christmas," hangs above his couch. Inscribed on its tiny mailbox is the name Purdy, a tribute to the teacher.

Purdy dismisses the sentimental scene. "Too tinselly," he says.

Later, he says, when Kinkade was out of college and at loose ends, Purdy suggested he create a print to benefit the local library. At $25 per copy, "Main Street at Dusk, Placerville, 1916," was a slow starter. But Purdy bought the first 35 copies, word spread and sales soared. Soon, Kinkade launched his print business and Kinkadia began to take root.

Purdy donated his only Kinkade original, an early work called "Mountain Cathedral," to El Dorado High, where it now hangs in the computer lab. The painting, acquired for a few hundred dollars, is one of Purdy's favorites. He's heard a rumor the school might sell it for as much as $1 million.

The school says it has no such plans, but it wouldn't matter to Purdy. While he's proud of the fact that he's raised more than $1 million himself for area causes, Purdy says he's never been obsessed with money.

The teacher says he still admires his former student, who's also been generous in his charitable efforts. But he just can't buy all his talk about God and the restorative value of a cup of tea.

"Absolute nonsense!" Purdy says. "All is hell and horror in the world. If there is a personal God, why doesn't he stop it?"

Purdy knows Kinkade is under pressure; the "public demands those cottages," he says. But he also knows that Kinkade's efforts to make the world a prettier place, like those of the Romantic poets he once studied in Purdy's classroom, are ultimately futile.

So what would he tell Kinkade, were he here right now?

"You have far [too much] talent. ... Now that you're wealthy, settle back and do some real, honest paintings," the old man says.

A friend who has just arrived puts a bundle of groceries on Purdy's kitchen table and urges him to try a new Popsicle flavor. She leaves with his laundry. The grandmother in jeans and a bouffant hairdo didn't have to read Kinkade to know that this is the right thing to do. Purdy is depressed, and she doesn't think twice about helping him.

Nearby, the new season flows through the veins of the kids at El Dorado High. Some already sport shorts and tank tops. Spring break starts tomorrow. A sense of hope and joy and happiness fills the air, owing nothing to the Kinkade hanging in the computer lab.