Howard Finster

Youth of Elvis

1983

Best known for his Paradise Garden, which he built in Pennville, Georgia, Howard Finster was a self-taught artist whose folksy brand of postmodern art strongly reflected the gregarious personality he was known for. Energetic and fantastical, Finster's paintings and prints come alive with spectacular detail and color. His work is crowded with text, Surrealist figures and miniature crosses, eyeballs, birds and stars.

A baptist minister by trade until his formal retirement in 1965, Finster spoke of an inspiration that came to him from on high. He experienced visions and claimed to hear the word of God in childhood, and often referred to himself as a “stranger from another world.” His visions led to a body of work he termed “sacred art,” a numbered series of thousands of paintings with strong religious overtones that took the form of text excerpts from the Bible and his own sermons. Finster painted portraits of Elvis Presley, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln, along with angels, devils, aliens and folklore figures like Santa Claus.

Prior to painting, Finster started constructing Paradise Garden, his most ambitious work, in the 1960s. A testament to human innovation and a tribute to God, this two-acre art environment consisted of varied recycled materials, concrete and sculptures. Its walls and walkways were embedded with TV tubes, bicycle parts and other found objects and scrap bits of metal sourced from Finster's repair business.

Finster began to exhibit his riveting folk art in 1976, when several of his pieces were included in “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770-1976,” hosted at the Atlanta Historical Society and the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah, among other institutions. The artist and his Paradise Garden were featured in the 1983 music video for American rock band R.E.M.'s song “Radio Free Europe.” Soon afterward, Finster was commissioned by another band, Talking Heads, to design the cover for the act’s Little Creatures album. Although he already had a fairly large local following, this exposure gave Finster's work national attention.

Finster died in 2001, leaving behind a legacy of what is now known as outsider art that could fill entire museums — more than 46,000 sculptures, paintings, prints and other works. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, holds the largest collection of Finster's work.

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