As the story goes, in 1976, when Howard Finster was 60, the Baptist preacher was painting a bicycle when he got paint on his hand and fell into a vision.
“I looked at that finger, after I got the paint on it, to see if too much paint on it, and there was a face, a human face in that paint, eyes, mouth, all that. That finger just talked to me, said, ’Paint sacred art,’” Finster told Don McGill and Susan Wallner for their 1992 video “Howard Finster: Man of Visions.” “And I said I can’t do that, professionals can, but not me, I’ve seen them, but not me. And it come to me one more time, ‘How do ya know? How do ya know?’ And it just dawned on me: How do ya know? How do ya know? And from that then I started painting art.”
“God told him you only need to paint 5,000. He kind of took that and went for gold,” says Mary Shewan, a curatorial archivist fellow at Paradise Garden, the visionary environment that Finster created on a 2.5-acre plot in Summerville, Georgia. By Finster’s own count, he eventually produced 46,991 artworks, plus Paradise Garden. He became one of the most famous folk artists of the 20th century—appearing on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” and painting album covers for the bands Talking Heads and R.E.M. “It was almost like a constant desire to produce work because God told him to and to speak the word of God. … I’ve been put on earth to spread a message so I have to do as much as I can of it.”
The method behind Finster’s enormous productivity is the focus of the exhibition “Behind the Brain of a Genius: Finster’s Cut-Outs, Dimensions and Molds from the Paradise Garden Archive” at the Paradise Garden Museum & Visitor Center in Georgia from Jan. 27 to April 28, 2024.
Finster, who died at age 84 in 2001, produced in quantity by making numerous varying versions of the same image. The show features wooden templates that Finster used to cutout wooden multiples of an image that he would then paint—angels, devils, Coke bottles, George Washingtons, cats, elephants, kangaroos, giraffes, rabbits, dinosaurs. “He called them ‘dimensions,’” says Shewan, who organized the exhibition.
The show also includes molds from which he cast the Christian Virgin Mary and her baby Jesus, fruit, butterflies, horses and other sculptures embedded in the concrete wall along Knox Street at the front of the garden. Shewan says, “Every mold on the wall it’s somewhere on the wall at the front gate in the mosaic garden.”
“He didn’t make the molds. It was like if I have these base things I can make more of what I want to produce,” Shewan says. “With the garden, his intention was to create a safe space for humanity, almost a Noah’s Ark, if you will. His desire to produce more in the garden was I want to give this space as much love and as much energy as I can so that it can continue to be a safe space and refuge.”
The templates and molds were found in a building at the mosaic garden end of the “Rolling Chair Ramp” that bridges Paradise Garden. The structure is called Pauline’s—after Finster’s wife, for whom he built it. But she didn’t need it, so Finster used it for storage. Shewan says, “They knew it was there, but it [the molds and templates] had never been seen by anyone other than the people who worked there.”
“He was very systematic despite him being considered a relatively free-form artist … He knew he was getting exactly what he wanted each time. The dimension itself wasn’t what was sacred, it was what he was putting on the dimension that was sacred. So he could spend more of his time focusing on the sacred part of the art.”
Some of the templates “are not in a state to be shown. Some of them have faded with time. Some were cut on super-thin wood, so some have been snapped off or are missing things.”
“I wanted to pick cutouts that people could recognize from some of his most notable paintings,” Shewan says. “I also wanted to show the evolution of how how he did the cutouts.”
“At the very beginning, he was kind of using just what he had around. So he was using thick pieces of wood,” Shewan says. “That’s not very conducive to producing multiples, and producing all the work he needed to produce.”
“Then he moved to thinner pieces of wood,” Shewan says. And the template for the ant is cardboard.
“He spent his life dedicated to art,” Shewan says. “He was a biblical man before anything else. … He believed he was preaching through art. He was preaching through art. He did not stop producing. … When he got his vision he did everything in his power to produce as much sacred art as he could. … I think if anything that’s just a clear display of how much he believed in what he was doing and how the word of God made him believe in himself.”
Shewan says, “He was such an interesting person. His interests were so vast. I think it’s incredible that we have cutouts of angels, and it’s considered some of the greatest displays of angels in American art history, but then you turn around there’s an ankylosaurus down the wall, then there’s a House Divided. … Then you turn the corner and there’s a kangaroo.”
“His final step wasn’t finishing the last dot of paint, the final step was making sure the painting was known and writing on it,” Shewan says. Finster would “write a [Bible] verse or write a thought he had about God.”
Shewan says, “Even if the images themselves weren’t sacred, what made them sacred was Howard.”
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