Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden: a folk-art haven made from ‘other people’s junk’ | Chattanooga Times Free Press (2024)

Howard Finster, a Baptist preacher turned self-taught artist, was sometimes called "the grandfather of Southern Folk Art" or "the Andy Warhol of the South."

The best way to understand the late eccentric artist is to visit Paradise Garden near Summerville, Georgia, which Finster built by hand over 30 years.

"The gardens," as he called it, is a shamble of structures created from scraps and what Finster called "other people's junk." It features winding mosaic pathways, bright murals, a painted Cadillac and a ramshackle chapel called the World's Folk Art Church on 2.5 acres in Pennville, a small community outside Summerville. About 43 miles from downtown Chattanooga, Paradise Garden is an easy day trip and allows you to drop into Finster's world.

Paradise Garden was built from discarded tin, pieces of old bicycles painted with tractor enamel and other cast-aside objects. The Smithsonian American Art Museumonce described it as Finster's "ever-changing environmental sculpture."

An inscription on one of his paintings described Paradise Garden this way: "I took the pieces you threw away — put them together by night and day — washed by rain and dried by sun, a million pieces ... all in one."

Finster started building Paradise Garden in 1961 but did not start painting until 1976 at the age of 59, says Tina Cox, executive director of the Paradise Garden Foundation.

His work consists of colorful, childlike paintings of recognizable images such as co*ke bottles and Elvis, along with heavenly ones too, like angels and fantasy landscapes.

According to the Paradise Garden website, "He saw himself as a sacred artist, tirelessly recording his visionary prophesies and providing glimpses of a celestial outer-space world that God revealed to him."

Finster's 2001 obituary in the New York Times remembered him as "one of the remarkable outsider artists of the 20th century."

But his beginnings were humble. Finster was born in rural Valley Head, Alabama, in 1916, one of 13 children and raised on a farm. He didn't attend school past sixth grade and started preaching at age 16.

He was the forefather of the Southern folk art movement — in which untrained artists used found objects because they did not have access to traditional arts materials but possessed a need "to create and to express something," Cox says.

"I like to think of him as being the original upcycler. He was the green movement before it was cool to do," she says. "He was creating art from found objects; he was using what he had. "

Later, Cox says, Finster introduced the folk art movement to pop culture.

Gen Xer music fans will remember him for a pair of '80s album covers. Athens, Georgia-based band R.E.M. in 1983 filmed a music video for the song "Radio Free Europe" at Paradise Garden and featured Finster's work on the band's 1984 album "Reckoning."

In 1895, the Talking Heads commissioned Finster to paint the cover of their album "Little Creatures," which Rolling Stone magazine named Album Cover of the Year.

On "The Tonight Show" in 1983, Finster told host Johnny Carson: "I just had a feeling to build this garden." He described how he gathered items others threw away as he created Paradise Garden. "I'm trying to get one of everything in the world," he said.

Finster produced 46,991 works of art before his death in 2001. His work is featured in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, the Whitney Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Atlanta's High Museum of Art, among others.

But Paradise Garden is where you'll get the best glimpse into the artist's world.

In the book "Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World," Norman Girardot referred to Paradise Garden as "an untamed, environmental amalgamation, and a roadside attraction of oddities (as well as a depleted collection of the inventions of humankind) vaguely harkening back to Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and the nearby Rock City."