Standing beside Andre Chanlatte on the open floor of the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, I feel distinctly out of place. Although I'm a student at the University and have spent much time in this space, Chanlatte seems infinitely more at ease surrounded by the deafening midday chatter of the building in which he has worked as both an artist and custodian for 21 years. This place knows him, and he knows it. Putting aside my initial discomfort, I ask about his paintings, which are frequently displayed in the atrium only a few feet from where we stand. His response, stocked thickly with a Haitian accent, is both self-satisfied and genuinely deferential to the campus community in which he has ingrained himself for so long and from which he will depart for good in less than a month. "I want to do something to make everybody happy with the type of work I do," he says. "Everybody love the way I paint. Everybody I see has told me, 'Oh, I love your paintings. I love the way you paint,' and I tell them, this is a God gift. This comes from God."

Chanlatte and his art have a nearly ubiquitous presence on the Brandeis campus. I often find him leaning against an atrium wall, dressed in the drab blue slacks-and-jacket uniform of the University's custodial staff, his arms crossed and his rounded waistline jutting out. Sometimes I stop to watch as his proud, dark face surveys the people swarming by through a pair of rounded spectacles, his mop of curly, black hair sprouting out from under a limp-billed cap.

On certain days a table lined with an array of brightly colored and astonishingly intricate paintings sits in front of him. Made from a unique mixture of banana bark and mulch, the pieces depict varied and unexpected subjects: an exotic woman dancing in the jungle, island villagers washing clothes, the Boston skyline hovering over a shining, ethereal Charles River. The images nearly explode off the canvas, straining to achieve a third dimension.

Chanlatte's table sucks in people passing through the Atrium. I'm often one of them.

The paintings "catch my eye like it's going to catch your eye, too," Chanlatte tells me. "Even me, when I paint a painting, I have emotion. I have a lot of emotions that come on my mind, and I look at the painting, and I get shocked."

"And," he adds with quick, excited emphasis, "it could be for you, too. When you see the painting, you're going to get shocked, too. Everybody who look at the painting, they're going to get shocked."

But his time to captivate the college audience is running out. After more than two decades at the university, Chanlatte is moving to Tampa with his wife and son at the end of November. He says he is cold here, and the winter weather hurts his legs and back. He says he doesn't want to leave, but the pain is too great. It's a fact that elicits immense sadness from Chanlatte.

"I'm going to miss everybody. I'm gonna miss a lot of things," he tells me. "When I have a show, everybody is there." His voice quavers, and he pauses. Wetness wells up in his eyes as he stares off to the side. "This is really sad, man."

I don't know how to respond. The man everyone knows only as a brilliant, broom-pushing artist has revealed another side of himself. I feel as if I should console him and offer reassurance that balmy Tampa winters are reason enough for anyone to leave New England. But the weather is not what concerns him. "I have a lot of friends here," he says later. "Where do these friends come from? My art, my art."

Born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Chanlatte says he soaked up the island culture when he was young. He would go to parties and spend all night taking in the sights and sounds of people around him. "I don't drink or smoke," he says. "I just enjoy the culture."

Chanlatte began to work for galleries in Haiti, painting cards with oil and acrylic-but not yet with his signature bark-and-mulch technique. When his brother emigrated to America to join the army, Chanlatte quickly followed suit, arriving in New York City in 1979. He lived in Manhattan for his first year in the country, working in the shipping department of a company that made belts and purses. Walking the streets of New York, he'd look up at the Twin Towers and other neighboring high-rises and wonder at how his world had changed.

Chanlatte moved to Waltham in 1981 and began work at Brandeis four years later. As time passed, he continued to dabble artistically. He sold cards to graduate students at the Heller School for Social Policy and enrolled in correspondence courses at the New York Institute of Photography in 1990, receiving a degree in 1995. But it wasn't until the World Trade Center's towers fell in 2001 that Chanlatte began to find the divine inspiration to paint in his own inimitable style.

"I'm watching the World Trade Center collapse, and tears come to my eye," he says. "And I just asked God, 'Please, I'd like to paint the building. Give me the skill to paint the building.' And I did the painting, and it come out perfect. That was my first painting."

Chanlatte paints with exceptional attention to detail. In his studio space on Prospect Street, Chanlatte assembles thousands of tiny, dyed bark pieces to create mosaic murals sometimes four or five feet in length. He says he takes inspiration from an amalgamation of island cultures, and many of his pieces feature tropical scenes and breezy ocean backdrops.

But much of his work draws from more mundane sources; Chanlatte showed me sketches of celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Will Ferrell ("I think his name is Will," he says, as if it makes little difference one way or the other.) He also says he plans to display a mural of the Waltham Watch Factory when a new Watch Factory museum opens in April.

Whatever form his muse takes, Chanlatte displays a staggering confidence in the beauty of his work, and he seems determined to let it define him. "Those paintings, the bark, when I seal it on the canvas, it's there forever," he says. "Nothing can take it out, nothing. It's there forever."

I have been talking with Chanlatte in the Atrium over an hour, and he's shown no intention of stopping. He unfurls an excited, emotional, and at times, rambling narrative into my tape recorder as I fill a binder with frantic notes. But, to my surprise, he pauses and suddenly bristles when I suggest I could publish a piece about him in the school paper. He says he has declined television interviews in the past and doesn't want that kind of publicity. I ask if he wouldn't like students to know about his looming departure. That would be fine if the Brandeis community alone would read it, he says, but he has seen stacks of the paper around town.

"I don't want people to know a lot of things about me, 'cause I'm a person that, if I want to be a famous artist, I want to be secret famous," he says, gazing to his left, suddenly stern and serious. "I don't want nobody to know I'm famous. I can be next to you, friends with you, and I'm famous. And that's the way I want it. That's the way I want it." He later consented to the printing of this article.

When Chanlatte leaves for Tampa at the end of the month, he'll take with him a box of drawings, several smaller paintings that were not shipped with the rest of his collection and a book filled with comments written by students at his atrium art shows. He says the support students offered in the book brings him to tears. He thanked students, faculty and co-workers at a reception in the atrium on Friday, his last day of work. "They give me great courage, great prosperity when I get in Tampa to paint [and] to never give up," he says. "And I do that. That's what I'm gonna do."

Chanlatte says he knows a gallery in Tampa that will sell copies of his work on postcards. They want him to focus on boats, he says, and he hopes to earn income by painting the yachts of wealthy Floridians. But money isn't what drives him, and as he stands with his usual swagger against a side wall of the atrium, he knows this venue can't be replaced.

"You make money to pay the bills, right?" he asks me. "But money don't cry for me when I die. People going to cry for me. If they put me in a coffin with money, the guy who put me in the ground, he take the money, right? But if they put a picture of me, they let me go with the picture." He throws out his arms and chuckles. "You know what I'm saying? You know?