Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia

Man of Visions: Preacher Howard Finster of Pennville

Man ofVisions PREACHER HOWARD FINSTER OF PENNVILLE ! 3NG HORIZONTAL PAINTING in tractor enamel from Howtrd Finster's Paradise Garden shows a landscape offlood and devastation: trees uprooted, boats sinking, and cars overturned, their tiny human occupants reaching for help; ana out of this rises a great head of Albert Einstein, labeled "Einstein painted from a postage stamp," his eyes plaintively turned up toward heaven. A crudely lettered poem reads: The storm has swept my golden shores and took My friends away. The youth has rose and know me not I am a stranger on my way. My treasures liebeyond This land my Gold is in the skye; I'll find my friends once again, I'll meet them by and by. Finster is projecting part of his own complicated view of the world through the great physicist; he has described his own brain as "beyond the light of sun." He calls himself "Man of Visions" and a stranger in this world. His garden extends over two acres behind his simple home to a church he recently bought on the next street, which is to become the "world's first Folk Art Church." In the garden Howard has laid out walkways, lagoons, and bridges; a thirty-foothigh tower of bicycle parts carries roses toward the sky; there are paintings of George Washington and of himself on the pavement, and there is a wire rabbit hutch in the shape of a locomotive, and hundreds of concrete walls, sculptures, and structures with pottery sfrards and mirror fragments set in them. A plywood angel flies above a house of mirrors, and another house is built of blue Phillips Milk of Magnesia bottles ("That house is unfinished,"Howard explains, "I run low on that blue glass, they're about played out, and people brings them to me"). There are paintings of Elvis Presley and Henry Ford as children, and overhead trellises with flowers, bean vines, and as close to "every man-madeitem" as Howardcould find, clinging to them. Until about 1975 few people outside the Chattooga County communityof Pennville had seen any of this; at that time a woman from Summerville alerted a TV news team, which, as Howard says, "started the publicity part of it." Now the fame of the preacher, singer, banjo picker, writer, and painter who created the garden has spread over the nation. "It's been sort of like a dream," Howard told us on one of our visits to the garden, in 1981. "If a man had told me ten years ago that I'd be invited to speak in an art class in these big universities, I wouldn't have b'lieved him, I'd a-laughed at him. And if someone had told me some day you'll go to California, it'll cost $491 to get you there and back, and you'll go to Colorado and you'll speak at a university, and see Pike's Peak, and go to California, speak at two universities, and you'll be cared for, you live in a museum when you're there, won't cost you nothin', and you'll come home with a little pick-up money, I wouldn't have believed that. I give Godcredit for all these things. That's what the garden is all about." The art students who meet Howard Finster on his lecture tours encounter a small man with slicked-back hair, wearing a rumpled double-breasted suit; his eyes squint and shine out of his lined face, and he pours out a seemingly endless stream of reminiscences, parables, songs, poems, and advice on how to make art out of such things as salmon cans. Visitors to the garden find him working or lying at repose on an insistently decorated walkway or under a bower, dressed in his paint-spattered "hobo" clothes, as if he were 218 Man of Visions A in some hobo jungle of the thirties. A sign facing the street announces, i TOOK THE PIECES YOU THREW AWAY ANDPUT THEM TOGETHER BY NIGHT AND DAY. WASHED BY RAIN, DRIED BY SUN, A MILLION PIECES, ALL IN ONE. In 1976 Howard began to produce paintings to be exhibited outside the garden, and he has numbered each one since that time; to date he has painted over two thousand and has had one-man shows in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. His paintings were first exhibited in 1977...