Howard Finster: Man of Visions
A film by Julie Desroberts, Randy Paskal
and Dave Carr. 1988. VHS video. 20 minutes. Color. Available from
First Run / Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn NY
11201. Website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
Department of Art,
University of Northern Iowa,
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net.
Howard Finster was a Southern tent preacher
and a prolific creator of amateur art. In a mere 25 years, he made
more than 46,000 works of "sacred art" (one time producing as many
as 17 pieces in less than a half hour), some of which he initially
placed in his Paradise Gardens Park and Museum, a major tourist attraction
in northern Georgia. He experienced his first religious vision at
the age of three: While searching for his mother in "the 'mater patch"
on their farm in Alabama, he saw his dead sister Abby emerge from
the clouds. (He was sure of the date, because it took place in the
year that he was hit in the head by his mother with "the tater fork.")
Called to preach at age 16, he served as the pastor for nine different
fundamentalist churches, while also conducting tent revivals. He retired
from the ministry in 1976 and turned instead to making art, along
with bicycle and mower repair. This happened in part because one day,
while repairing a bicycle, he saw a face in a paint stain on his finger
tip. When a voice then told him he should "make sacred art," he demurred,
believing that he lacked the training to be a serious artist, to which
the voice then responded "How do you know?" In this brief and slightly
dated film, a somewhat tired Finster talks about his religious and
artistic development, and the way in which the two tracks merged in
the use of his paintings for preaching. This film (which is made up
of portions of interviews with Finster and with university art professors,
critics, collectors and art dealers) was produced in 1988, by which
time the artist had appeared on the Johnny Carson Show, had illustrated
album covers for R.E.M. and the Talking Heads, was selling his "Outsider
Art" like hotcakes, and was well on his way to becoming as much of
a ballyhooed insider in the corrupt New York art world as any aspiring
artist would want. In anthropology, sincere observers do their best
to guard against their own contamination of the culture that they
are observing. Just back from a final publicity jaunt to New York,
Finster came down with pneumonia and died in 2001 at age 84. From
all appearances, he was a sincere, ambitious and talented man (even
gifted)--but he was not, as a scene from this film would suppose,
the post-modern era's equivalent of William Blake.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly
Review.)