Howard Finster

About me:

The Reverend Howard Finster was a folk artist from Pennville, Georgia. His images ranged from pop culture icons like Elvis Presley to historical figures like George Washington to religious images like "The Devils Vice" and "John the Baptist" to his own visions. His paintings are colorful and detailed; they use flat picture plane without perspective and are often covered with words, especially Bible verses.

R.E.M. filmed the video for their debut single "Radio Free Europe" in Finster's Paradise Gardens in 1983. The following year, the band's singer Michael Stipe and Finster collaborated on a painting for the cover of their second album Reckoning. After that the band made the song "Maps and Legends" (in its third album "Fables of the Reconstruction")as an homage to Finster. The Talking Heads commissioned a Finster painting for Little Creatures in 1985 that was subsequently selected as album cover of the year by Rolling Stone magazine.

Howard Finster was responsible for introducing millions to outsider art, but even with his fame, he remained focused on spreading the word of God. He said of the Talking Heads album, "I think there's twenty-six religious verses on that first cover I done for them. They sold a million records in the first two and a half months after it come out, so that's twenty-six million verses I got out into the world in two and a half months!"