It sounds crazy, but the way late folk artist Howard Finster told the story, the mysterious face said, “Paint sacred art; paint sacred art.”
The vision came to the retired Baptist preacher in 1976 while he was working on a bicycle in his Pennville, Georgia, repair shop. One of a lifelong string of visions, it was just the sign he needed to devote the rest of his days to spreading God’s message through art.
Finster was 59.
“When most people are winding down, he was winding up,” said Jordan Poole, executive director of Paradise Garden, a 4-acre property teeming with Finster’s creations, about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta.
And more than a dozen years after his death, interest in Finster seems to be winding up again, too.
He’s one of the headliners in a new exhibit in Baltimore at the American Visionary Art Museum, which bills him as “America’s most prolific self-tutored and ‘on fire’ artist.” He’s also the star of the documentary “Paradise Garden: Howard Finster’s Legacy,” released this year by Art West Film.
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Despite the work ahead, the transformation is already apparent to repeat visitors.
Theresa Dean, 56, an art teacher from Sandy Springs, Georgia, has been to the garden several times since her first visit in 2007. She visited again at the end of October with a group of middle school students.
There’s been a “huge change” since her last visit about two years ago, she said.
“It’s beautiful,” Dean said. “I can tell they’re still working, but it just seems like it’s loved, well-loved.”
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