Howard Finster

1916-2001 · Summerville, Georgia, USA

A Georgia preacher saw a face in a smudge of paint on his fingertip in 1976. It told him to make sacred art. He made 46,991 pieces, and numbered every one.

The life

Finster preached from his teens and fixed bicycles in Summerville, Georgia, where he was already turning his backyard into a garden of concrete, scripture and other people’s cast-offs. After the fingertip vision he painted at a ferocious pace, on board, bottles, shoes and cars, signing and numbering each work. Johnny Carson had him on television, art students made pilgrimages, and he treated fame as one more pulpit.

The work

Sermon-crowded paintings of angels, Elvis, Coca-Cola bottles, inventors and flying machines, every margin packed with text, plus Paradise Garden itself, a swampy wonderland of embedded mirrors, tools and testimony. He painted the album covers for R.E.M.’s Reckoning and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures, which put outsider art into a million record crates.

Why we love them

He treated art as a loudspeaker that never needed permission, and output as a form of devotion. Forty six thousand works is not a career, it is a weather system.

Go deeper

• Paradise Garden Foundation
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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