THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 3, 1994 TAG: 9411030052
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By MARK MOBLEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 169 lines
YOU COULD CALL folk artist Howard Finster this generation's Grandma Moses.
But you'd also have to accept a Grandma Moses obsessed with UFOs, nuclear waste and cable TV.
Paintings and sculpture by the Summerville, Ga., preacher and former bicycle repairman are on display at the College of William and Mary through Nov. 13. The Muscarelle Museum of Art is showing two dozen prints, plywood paintings and objects ranging from soda cans to something called ``Dried Paint Art.''
The pieces are covered with tiny figures and religious slogans in Finster's instantly recognizable handwriting. You may not know his name, but if you follow rock music, you've seen his stuff - his tiny people dot Talking Heads' ``Little Creatures,'' and his snakes coil across the cover of R.E.M.'s ``Reckoning.''
The show traces Finster's rise from little-known eccentric to internationally known artist and leader of ``The World's Folk Art Church Inc.'' The holy man who once fixed bicycles to support a sculpture habit now has work selling for tens of thousands of dollars. He has scoped out the universe and is showing it to the world.
``I've had a vision of Planet Hell,'' Finster said Monday. ``Walked around on it, seen people sitting around in old smut stuff, fires around burning, no babies to cry, no books to read. I've seen torment of separation, torment of you didn't have no bathroom, torment of no water, no Co'-Colas, no Stanback, no cocaine.
``I see so much I can't tell people about it. I have so many visions and God showed me so much it's hard to remember it all. My problem is the world. It ain't just my five kids and fifteen grandchildren.''
Finster, being a prophet, is someone you don't converse with. You listen. What started out to be a brief phone interview about the Muscarelle show turned into a 90-minute sermon on Creation, the Apocalypse, the Flood and the nature of the soul. He also touched on international relations, the difficulties of running a business, dealing with the media and the disappear
ing Christian tradition of foot washing.
This is a man who's worked with art and rock stars and who uses words like ``superpowers'' and ``texts.'' But when he talks about ``Kaiser Bill,'' he's not joking about the president. He's referring to World War I, during which he was born.
He had his first vision as a toddler in Valley Head, Ala. He saw his sister, who had passed away, floating above him in a field. He later preached as a Freewill Baptist minister until he was almost 50, when he had started on what would become his most impressive achievement, the Paradise Garden.
Finster said he had become frustrated by people forgetting the messages in his sermons.
``Only one man would remember what I said. I'd become upset and I felt like I wasn't a good shepherd. I said, `God, I want to preach all over the world and I want people to remember what I tell 'em. So God come and got me started on making art.''
Over three decades, the 77-year-old Finster has transformed three swampy acres into a wonderland of junk made inspirational. There is so much to see, so much to think on - countless words of Biblical wisdom, shards of American history, sculpture of concrete and tile, buildings bedecked with metal.
``Right from my garden and right from my yard I can help educate people and help convert the world,'' he said.
In 1977, Finster's work was included in an exhibition of Georgia folk art, and his reputation grew further through a Life magazine appearance in 1980. He also started lecturing at colleges.
``Miami University. Richmond, Virginia. West Virginia. North Carolina. All of them there pay me $300 a day to teach folk art, and when I put the screen on and the garden on the screen, a Bible verse comes up and I talk on the verse. I find myself preaching in a university and on the screen, the Word of God.''
``He had boundless energy, which is pretty obvious when you see the amount of work he's produced,'' said Roanoke painter Brian Sieveking, who first met Finster at a Virginia Tech workshop 10 years ago. He since has collaborated with Finster on a number of prints, some of which are in the Muscarelle show.
``At the time, he made art out of TV sets, toilet seats, lamps, G.I. Joe soldiers, concrete,'' Sieveking said. ``I also liked the fact that he would just become continuously interested in different things he had seen. What impressed me about Howard was he was making art about anything that interested him. He didn't ask, `Was Henry Clay, Henry Ford or Hank Williams important enough to make a painting about?' ''
The Muscarelle show includes a celebration of Coca-Cola featuring the lines, ``Cokes would sell without any advertising. Cokes make their own way. Thousands of church folks drink Cokes and drive safely. Coke is looking in on you.'' From the Virginia Tech workshop there's a collaborative full-size portrait of Finster in a dress as the ``Master Beautician.''
There's also a piece with local relevance. One painting includes this note: ``4:52 past midnight. Sept. 29 1985. By Howard Finster from God. 700 Club is praying a storm away from Virginia coastline now.''
``I watch 'em all the time,'' Finster said of ``The 700 Club.'' ``They do many things all the time. It's like a rescuing squad coming in to save the world.'' But the artist's view of the Bible is a little different from Pat Robertson's.
``I preach on Howard Finster's message of the Bible. Not `The 700 Club,' not the Billy Graham club but the Bible club. Jesus washed the saints' feet. That's no parable. Jesus said, you oughta also wash one another's feet. They quit the foot washing years ago, but that goes with the Lord's Supper. Way I see it, it's just too embarrassing to wash each other's feet. But that's what it's for, to get people together.''
Finster has proven his ability to bring people together. The Paradise Garden, about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta, draws such crowds that Finster finally moved away a couple of years ago. He visits only on Sunday afternoons.
On a typical Sunday a couple of summers ago, Finster talked and talked, as the visitors - most of whom were Atlanta music-scene kids - came up and hung around him in shifts. Sometimes he sang, sometimes he preached.
Two young women knelt before him, presenting a rock they'd run over on the way there, a rock the size of a small ottoman. They just wanted him to sign it, but he also found the face of an angel on the surface and traced it with a felt-tip pen.
The garden's gallery is run by various family members. ``It's an increasingly complicated situation, with so many people doing posters and T-shirts,'' Sieveking said. But Finster's art is also sold there for much less than what it fetches in the big cities.
Most of what's in stock is recent work. Finster began numbering his pieces in the '70s, and Sieveking has a 1985 piece that's number 4206. An angel from 1993 is 30,086. Now, Finster is up to 35,111.
The craftsmanship has changed. A small Finster bird in a Baltimore collection dates from a few years back and is nailed to a block of wood with a sermon written on it. On a similar dog from 1993 purchased at the garden, the sermon is on a photocopied piece of paper glued to the wood.
``Over the last seven years, mostly in the last five, the output has just increased geometrically,'' Sieveking says. ``It's gotten very popular among certain people to start knocking him for that. Part of the reason he's switched to the smaller things is he's gotten much older. He works mostly in bed.
``People say, `Well, you know he's a showman.' Well, of course he is. It's a showmanship that was formed as a circuit-riding evangelist. Howard has always been very much aware of the show. He's always been aware of how to talk to a camera. He's very sincere about the message he's relating through all of this.
``He's in a lot of major collections around the world. It'll be interesting to see how the reputation plays out. Over the next 30 years, there'll be a real bash-Finster period and a real rediscovery period, much in the way right now there's a sort of bash-Warhol period. I don't think he's that huge, but there's no question he's going to go through all that.''
As Finster grows older, he spends more and more time in his bedroom. ``I've got a 61-inch TV set where I can tell what's going on in the world,'' he said. ``That's the only way I can tell when my prophecies come true. I've got tapes I can turn on and hear Jesus talk or the Apostles or anything in the Bible.''
His new projects range from pieces commissioned by galleries around the country to collaborations with New York mass-production artist Mark Kostabi. One of Finster's latest works, the ``Nuclear Shoe,'' is a shoe-shaped painting of a vision about recycling nuclear waste into helpful products. ``Five years from now, when this comes to pass, whoever's got that shoe, it'll be priceless,'' Finster said.
He is eager to get a movie made from his book ``Vision of 200 Light Years Away,'' an account of a space journey with his best friend and their wives. He is also dictating a book of visions on the phone.
``People are following my prophecy, and it's making my stuff very important to people. We're in perilous times. Floods. I never heard of a flood in Texas before in my life. Mudslides, big mudslides down the side of a mountain into a valley. It's all coming to pass. I see it here on the TV. That fool who shot into the White House the other day.
``I spend hours preaching here. Sometimes I think I speak more in my bed than I did in the pulpit.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Many Howard Finster works, like this portrait of himself in 1950,
feature handwritten religious slogans.
Finster's Paradise Garden in Georgia includes a tower that is
covered with his artwork.
Color photos by Carol Taylor
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by CNB