Few would have paid any attention to his vanishing act had Hill not left something behind. On the banks of Bayou Petit Caillou, dotted with shrimp boats, more than 100 brightly painted sculptures mark Hill's stay in Chauvin (pronounced show-van, population 3,400). Many of the pieces are made from cement and wire mesh, though the most prominent, a 45-foot-tall lighthouse, is composed of 7,000 bricks. Figures in relief stud the outside: musicians, cowboys, soldiers, angels, God and Hill himself.

Before Chauvin, Hill worked as a bricklayer in a town 60 miles west. After leaving his three children and the woman he married at 20 (when she was 14), he rented some property on the bayou in Chauvin for $250 a year in 1988. He lived in a tent while he did bricklaying jobs and built himself a small cottage. Then in 1990, without explanation, he started making religious scenes beside the house. Like many other self-taught or "outsider" artists, he was a resourceful scavenger, lifting sand, cement and bricks from nearby work sites. A neighbor welded the underlying metal armature for some of the sculptures.

Hill spent a decade working on his art without giving a thought to profit, according to those who knew him. This idea of making for making's sake is part of what Roger Cardinal meant when he coined the term "outsider art" in 1972, a translation of the French "art brut" first used by artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. Cardinal describes this art as "not hooked up to galleries ... it should be more or less inwards-turning and imaginative." He goes on to explain how this definition is fairly easy to use when categorizing the work of a dead artist but can become problematic when dealing with the living, who "might at some point, after all, go to their own openings and begin to be interviewed."

Howard Finster is perhaps the best-known outsider artist to actively enter the world of profit -- to the point of becoming a cottage industry. In his Paradise Garden in Pennville, Ga., Finster makes what he calls "sermons in paint." His fame spread via newspaper articles and TV appearances and then through pop culture after R.E.M. and the Talking Heads commissioned album covers from him. His Web site encourages visitors to call the 800 number and buy, buy, buy. At an auction in October, the price of pieces started at $300, but Finster didn't want anyone to lose out. "If you cannot afford a Howard Finster piece," the site suggests, "his daughter, Beverly Finster, is now re-creating his pieces for approximately 1/3 the price of a Howard Finster Original."

Hill may fit into a subcategory of outsider art -- "psychotic art." Cardinal finds in this genre "a quality of urgency, and sometimes quite fearful urgency, which can give ... viewers a particular emotional shock."

The reclusive 45-year-old Hill certainly came across to locals as disturbed, and several tried to help him before he vanished. A story in a regional paper described Hill as "an eccentric who was completely obsessed with his biblically themed sculptures."

Frederic Allamel, a French art sociologist, first noticed Hill's project in 1992. He remembers a handful of sculptures, most with only the armature in place, and the partially built lighthouse. He returned to Hill's site in 1999. On this visit, Hill came out of his house and started to talk about his work.

"He spoke as if he were in a trance," recalls Allamel, who describes Hill's monologue as irrational, spiritual and schizophrenic. "There was no chance for me to say a word."

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