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Paradise Garden
(artistic assemblage, c. 1990)
One of the most fascinating artistic creations of the twentieth century can be found nestled in the foothills about an hour north of Atlanta, Georgia. It is a four-acre garden designed, constructed, and decorated by Howard Finster, a Baptist preacher and arguably the most important folk artist of modern times. The garden, which came to be called Paradise Garden, is a chaotic, crazy-quilt patchwork of ramshackle buildings, odd sculptures and assemblages, rusty automobiles, and hundreds of paintings in his unusual signature style, all nestled among the trees and flowers and shrubbery. All these elements joined together are intended to be the focal point for his urgent spiritual message to modern men and women, a message about ultimate things: heaven and hell, moral admonitions, apocalyptic warnings, and a celebration of God’s love. Paradise Garden is a place where Finster’s mystical visions of faith are made visible through his redemption of the cast-off junk of our society.
Originally begun on a smaller scale, the garden grew over time, and Finster was still working on it at the end of his life. Although it was largely neglected for a number of years, recent attempts have been undertaken to restore it to its original state. Finster sometimes referred to himself as “God’s junk man,” and he built most of his Paradise Garden with discarded material, stuff that most people would think worthless: pieces of broken mirrors, old rusty tools, tin cans, random pieces of machinery, children’s toys, bus stop signs, Coke bottles, and other materials that were destined for the trash heap. But Finster saw the potential to make something beautiful and interesting from these very ordinary bits and pieces that he rescued from the local dump or from abandoned construction sites. He pieced all this “junk” together to make sculptures, signs, various odd assemblages, and decorative accents.
The defining structures located throughout the garden include the Bike Tower (a giant sculptural heap consisting of bicycle parts wired together), a walkway winding through the garden that is embedded with shiny bits of cosmetic jewelry, broken colored glass, and abandoned tools (commemorating his former job as a bicycle repairman, which he gave up to become a full-time artist), and the nearly fifty-foot-tall World Folk Art Church (which he designed and built himself) that somewhat resembles a sagging wedding cake and is topped by a spire. There is also a pump house constructed entirely of Coca-Cola bottles and cement, a giant concrete shoe that refers to the “beautiful feet of those who proclaim the Gospel of peace,” and the Bible House, a small structure covered entirely in Bible verses.
There are also dozens of sculptures and assemblages scattered around the garden, constructed from cement, wire, and all the unexpected little odds and ends that he imbedded in them: a doll’s head, broken pieces of mirror, Coke bottles, and so forth. Finster’s reclamation and reuse of discarded bits of trash represented, for him, a theological truth: that God is a redemptive God, One who fashions his saints out of the vilest materials, making of them something beautiful and holy. In God’s economy, no refuse is refused. A painted banner in the garden proclaims Finster’s vision: “I built this park of broken pieces to try to mend a broken world of people who are traveling their last road.”1
Along with the sheer joyful celebration of the ephemera of life represented by his recycled trash, which he transformed into a tactile wondrousness, are urgent messages calling upon the sinner to repent and turn to God. Finster didn’t shy away from calling for moral uprightness or warning of sin’s consequences. The garden even contains a wrecked Cadillac upon which he painted various slogans of caution and instruction, such as “This happens to drunk drivers” and “I heard the wreck on the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”
And everywhere there are paintings, adorned with Scripture and his own poetic messages, printed in his usual, urgent, all-caps script with often idiosyncratic spelling. There are hundreds of such paintings, usually brushed onto wooden surfaces and ranging in size from two inches to five feet. They mostly proclaim biblical messages, sometimes combining such messages with pop culture references or tributes to his heroes: Elvis Presley, Henry Ford, George Washington, and Shakespeare. Each is painted in Finster’s trademark style—simplistic cartoonlike figures crowded into a busy image and accented by an abundance of text that drives the message home. A recurrent theme of these works is the necessity of repentance in order to avoid God’s judgment. Finster suggested that the garden had “literally been covered up with Bible verses all over it, where a minister can come in here and bring a sinner and take him round and read him into the Kingdom of God.”2
Paradise Garden, Summerville, GA [Paradise Garden Foundation]
At first this backyard garden might seem to some visitors to be the ramshackle construction of a mentally unstable mind, a visual cacophony veering perilously close to insanity. But while it may seem a bit weird and wacky, Finster was deadly serious about his intentions. This strange artistic assemblage, like his astonishing output of paintings, is not the work of a madman but a quirky, eccentric, and incredibly inventive man who wanted to share the gospel through his art. The garden’s endlessly fascinating and unexpected elements make it a modern masterpiece that repays close attention. Many who have lingered in its environs have spoken enthusiastically of the sense of peace and spiritual nourishment they have found there.
Born in 1916 in Alabama, Howard Finster was a precocious and unusual child, and had the first of his many lifelong visions at age three when the ghost of his recently departed sister came to him with a message of comfort. Throughout his life he spoke of the visions that he was given by God, and these visions became the content for much of his art. He claimed that none of his creativity came from his own ingenuity but that he was merely transcribing what God had shown him.
Although Finster was a Baptist, he was converted in a Methodist revival meeting at age thirteen, and not long after received what he considered to be a “supernatural call” to the ministry. Although his formal education never proceeded past the sixth grade due to his family’s need for him to help out on the family farm, he studied the Bible passionately and wrote his first sermon at age sixteen, which was published in a local paper. Eventually he became an itinerant preacher, sharing the Good News throughout the South and supporting himself by various occupations, including bicycle repair. He was a popular preacher, and people loved the sermonic chalk talks he gave, which were an early indication of his artistic gifts.
Finster always loved making and repairing things, and as a hobby he began to build miniature buildings and whimsical sculptures. Over time, this developed into something that gained a bit of public attention. Then, in 1975, he was repairing a bicycle when he put a dab of paint onto the end of his finger to cover some scratches on the bike. He was startled to see that the paint made a distinct little human face, and then he heard a voice speak clearly to him, calling him to make sacred art. Like Moses at the burning bush, he demurred, telling God that he was not an artist. “How do ya know?” the voice insisted. To prove it once and for all, Finster pulled a dollar bill out of his wallet and used the picture of George Washington as a model. He was so pleased with his resulting drawing that he knew the call was genuine. And from that day, his entire focus was upon creating “sermons in paint” to share God’s urgent message with humankind. He saw himself as a “second Noah,” sent to warn humanity of the need to change their ways and embrace a life of love and moral purity.
As word got around about this eccentric artist/preacher, art students and folk art enthusiasts began to make the pilgrimage to Summerville, Georgia, to meet Howard Finster and see his creations. His work found such a ready market in art galleries that no matter how feverishly he worked, he could not fully meet the demand. His paintings were even featured on albums by popular music groups REM and the Talking Heads, which delighted Finster as it allowed him to imbed Bible verses on album covers that would be seen by millions of people. He was even asked to appear on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, where Carson was visibly amused and delighted by the straight-talking Southern preacher.
By the time of his death in 2001, Finster had created an astonishing 46,991 original pieces. We know the exact number because he kept track, and usually wrote the appropriate number somewhere on each piece of art. The works by this untrained artist (painted on wood, fiberglass, metal, the sides of buildings, shoes, Spam cans, or whatever might be at hand) have attracted the attention of both art critics and lovers of folk art for their unique stylistic approach and for the way they reveal the heart and passion of a man who found he could do his best preaching with a brush. Paradise Garden is the summation of his work and represents both his passion to share God’s message and the warm hospitality of the man who delighted in giving personal tours of his creation. A sign at the entrance reads: “Welcome to Paradise Garden. God is love.”
“I am sure about myself and my work,” he said. “I am sure about God and Jesus and the Bible. My responsibility is to get the message out all over the world.”3 In his own unique way, that is what Howard Finster did.