Howard Finster had visions. They started when he was three, but the one that most profoundly changed his life came at age 60 — after he’d spent more than four decades laboring as a plumber, grocer, carpenter, bicycle repairman, and traveling tent-meeting preacher. Finster was touching up an old bicycle with white tractor paint at his Pennville, Georgia, home in 1976 when a face appeared in the drippings. Finster later relayed that he felt a divine sense of calm and heard a voice instruct him to "paint sacred art." Although he had no formal training as an artist, Finster removed a dollar bill from his pocket and made the first of what he called his "sacred paintings," a portrait of George Washington.

When Finster died last Monday, October 22, at age 84, after being admitted to the hospital in Rome, Georgia, with blood clots in his lungs and a leg, he was America’s best-known folk artist. He had made thousands of his bright, colorful paintings and thousands of other pieces of art, including carved figures (ranging from Abraham Lincoln to devils and angels) and gigantic installations like the two-and-a-half-acre "Paradise Garden" he constructed from cement, mirrors, wire, gears, costume jewelry, and other materials on a swamp he filled in next to his home. When Finster was profiled by the New York Times in 1995, the article noted that he was completing his 36,892nd work. Finster numbered them all.

Finster was born in Valley Head, Alabama, in 1916. He was one of 13 children and quit school at 14; two years later he became a Baptist preacher. For nearly three decades he traveled the tent revival circuit in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. It was then that he began to create art — works inspired by the blackboard drawings with densely written texts that he made while teaching Sunday school, but also carvings and constructions from found objects like old jugs and auto parts. In 1961 he began Paradise Garden in Pennville, about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta.

But Finster was best known for his later sacred paintings, which sold for prices ranging from less than $100 to $20,000. Often painted on plywood, metal, or other discarded material, they are the "outsider art" equivalent of the illuminations made by pre-Renaissance monks, full of bright colors and floating or aura-surrounded figures, and jammed with cramped text offering scriptural lessons or observations on life. Finster had his first commercial show, at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago, in 1979. Today his work is in dozens of museums and available through a number of galleries; it can be viewed and purchased through his Web site, www.finster.com.

Within a few years of his introduction to the art establishment, Finster had become the most exhibited contemporary American folk artist. He also appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and at various folk-music festivals, where he played the banjo and sang. Finster recorded two albums, 1995’s Man of Many Voices (Smithsonian/Folkways) and ’97’s The Night Howard Finster Got Saved (Global Village). But what really brought him to the attention of the rock world was R.E.M.’s 1983 video for "Radio Free Europe," which was filmed in part in Paradise Garden, and his paintings for the album covers of R.E.M.’s Reckoning (I.R.S.) and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures (Sire).

Oddly enough, Finster hated rock music. When asked why he painted his Talking Heads View of the World for Little Creatures, he explained, "I had 23 million verses go out and reach the world. That’s more than I ever reached in 45 years of pastoring. The rock-and-rollers are my missionaries."

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001