Howard Finster believed his paintings could make believers out of people who saw them. With his works on display in two museums, the late folk artist must be smiling from heaven, drawing souls to God from here to Melbourne.
At the Vero Beach Museum of Art, the Holmes Gallery includes Finster among 34 Southern folk artists on display. Finster is also the subject of a show at The Florida Institute of Technology’s Foosaner Art Museum in Melbourne.
Finster’s religion-inspired paintings were a cross-over hit in the 1980s.
Today, nearly 15 years after his death, Finster’s star does not shine as brightly. The Foosaner aims to remedy that.
“I don’t know that many people are familiar with Finster,” says Jackie Borsanyi, curator at the Foosaner. She and Carla Funk, FIT’s Director of University Museums, are “fans of outsider art.”
“We hadn’t done an exhibition in this area in years,” Borsanyi says, adding Finster’s view of his career as a mission from God “engenders a lot of conversation about different kinds of artists.”
Comprising 29 works in mixed media paintings and prints, “The Visionary Works of the Reverend Howard Finster” presents a selection of the prolific artist’s work from 1975, the year he claims God instructed him to paint, to 1992.
On loan from a single private collection, most works in the show center on1988, near the end of Finster’s most creative period. Although he continued to paint up to his death in 2001, the last dozen years or so of his life saw the diminution of his imaginative powers, and the endless repetition of pet themes.
The current show presents the artist and his worldview in fine form. Its artworks, sparkling with brilliantly-colored oil enamel, glitter and miscellaneous repurposed materials, will amuse the jaded gallery-goer and delight the young.
The museum has anticipated the power of the artist’s work to inspire; a large felt picture board in one of the galleries invites visitors to use a myriad of Finsteresque felt cutouts to compose their own narrative, right on the spot.
Finster was born in 1916 in Alabama, one of 13 children of a farmer and sawmill owner. Young Finster left school after completing the 6th grade at age 14. He had professed his faith in God at a tent revival the year before; while still in his teens he had a career as a revivalist. He later was a Baptist church pastor, and held a job as a textile mill worker.
Finster first found artistic expression in a garden that he developed in Trion, GA, in the 1940s. There he built miniature castles and churches, visual aids for his sermons. In 1961 he moved to nearby Summerville, where he transformed four acres of swampland into a living piece of folk art. Amidst flowers, fruit trees and pens for chickens, ducks and rabbits, Finster created mosaic walkways, sculptures, a shed with Coke bottle walls, and towers of hubcaps, bicycle parts and old TVs. The garden’s pièce de résistance is The World’s Folk Art Church, a five-story wedding cake of a structure that Finster built atop a small church on the property.
Notoriety, the beginning of fame, came in 1975, says Borsanyi. “Esquire magazine published an article on his garden. He had called it the Plant Farm Museum, but they renamed it Paradise Garden, and that’s the name that stuck.”
It was also in 1975 that Finster, who by that time was making a living repairing bicycles, received a calling to ”paint sacred art.”
He was 59 years old.
The Foosaner show has two pieces from this early stage of his career.
“I Dreamed the World Came to an End,” created during 1975-76, is painted in oil-based “tractor enamel” on wood.
It’s a fiery red-and-orange depiction of hell on earth, where minuscule people run in aimless panic amid flames and sulfurous gases. Finster put his dire vision into words, all upper case, in white paint against a purplish red sky:
A more whimsical piece from 1976 features a portrait bust of George Washington – copied from a dollar bill – in oil enamel on a flat patty of shaped concrete. The inscription on Washington’s shoulder is evidence that early on, the artist had his eye on posterity. “Near First Work, Emage (sic) of George Washington by Howard Finster,” it reads.
He soon began to date and number each of his works; he said a vision had specifically instructed him to create 5,000 paintings with which to win souls for God. The Foosaner exhibition boasts Finster’s 5,000th piece of art, created in 1985. The wordy painting includes the artist’s smiling self-portrait and a timeline with the legend, “As the years went up, pressure went down. My soul free.”
After reaching his God-appointed goal, Finster did not stop. Near his life’s end he claimed to have completed some 46,000 individual works of art. In the current show, a cutout painting titled “If the Shoe Fits,” is numbered 25,000.
Finster had his first gallery show in 1976; in the following year his work came to the notice of the American Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress, which later commissioned several paintings. In 1979 Chicago’s Phyllis Kind Gallery gave Finster a solo show; the gallery’s New York location featured his work a couple years later. Finster’s art was part of the Venice Biennale in 1984.
It was not his art world coups, however, that gave Finster his widest fame. Popular acclaim came via his appearance in 1983 on “The Tonight Show,” where Finster played the holy fool, strumming a banjo and singing a couple of songs he made up. A born showman, he soon had the sniggering audience wildly cheering him on. In the mid-‘80s, Finster’s credibility with young hipsters soared when he created album art for the bands R.E.M. and Talking Heads.
For Finster, this exposure furthered his goal of saving as many people as possible before he would claim his eternal reward. One of his heroes – and the subject of two of the works in the Foosaner show – was Elvis Presley. It was not Presley’s talent that impressed him.
He once told an interviewer, “Because of his publicity, (Elvis) could have won more souls than anybody in the world.”
“A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country,” Jesus said, and so it was with Finster before the world beyond Summerville, GA, took notice.
“People didn’t understand what he was trying to do. It wasn’t until Johnny Carson, that they actually said, ‘Oh, okay’ – it was kind of a stamp of validation,” says Borsanyi. “It’s that inner passion that perseveres, through that noise of people not understanding and not validating. That is really interesting.”
Fortunately for the Foosaner, John Denton, the sole lender of the works in the exhibition, recognized Finster’s value early on. One of those works, “Unicorn,” is a freestanding cutout from 1987 (#60000.582) that Denton’s father (also named John) purchased sight unseen over the telephone the morning after the artist painted it. An inscription on the back of the piece blesses the collector and makes clear the artist’s intention for the work:
“May your collection finally reach a million people for God.”
The Visionary Works of the Reverend Howard Finster” will be on view through Jan. 10 at the Foosaner, 1483 Highland Avenue, in the Eau Gallie neighborhood of Melbourne.
