Where can we find information about Howard Finster, a folk artist from Pennville, Georgia, and why is his work so popular?Dear Visitor, 
Dear Joan of Art,
Where can we find information about Howard Finster, a folk artist from Pennville, Georgia, and why is his work so popular?Dear Visitor,
You can locate much information at Finster's own Web site: http://www.finster.com.
Selected paintings by Howard Finster from the Smithsonian American Art Museum can be seen online and in our traveling exhibition Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The following information on Howard Finster is from the Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists by Chuck and Jan Rosenak (New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1990).
"The Reverend Howard Finster has achieved superstar status for his exuberant paintings, or sermon art, and his impressive Paradise Garden environment, an ongoing expression of his religious conviction.
"'I preached about forty years. All the time I was preachin' … my mind was on building something … just something I told the Lord. Is there anything else you want me to do besides pastoring? Well, just show me.' So recalls Reverend Finster, an evangelical Baptist preacher who for more than forty years has preached the Lord's word at tent revival meetings and as minister of various churches throughout the rural South.
"In 1965, after retiring as pastor of the Chelsea Baptist Church in Menlo, Georgia, Finster took up the avocation of repairing lawn mowers and bicycles in Pennville, Georgia. At about this time or slightly earlier, the preacher (who claims to have had religious visions since he was a child) says the Lord directed him to transform the two or so acres of swampland around his small repair shop into a Paradise Garden.
"The Garden, in Finster's words, was constructed 'from other people's junk.' He used a combination of materials, some donated and others rescued from local garbage dumps—broken dolls, tools, clocks—anything he could get his hands on. These objects were embedded in the concrete walls and paths that surround a tower 30 feet high that Finster had built of bicycle parts, other startling buildings that he had composed of bottles and other cast-off objects. …
"The art world discovered Finster through a series of museum exhibitions, starting with Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770–1976, mounted by the Georgia Council for the Arts and Humanities in 1977. His paintings were brought to national attention in 1980 by Life magazine in an article that included him with a number of other leading folk artists, and one of his drawings was used as a popular record cover."
I hope this information is helpful.
Sincerely,
Joan of Art
Pictured: Howard Finster, born 1916, THE LORD WILL DELIVER HIS PEOPLE ACROSS JORDAN, 1976, enamel on fiberboard, 30 1/8 x 29 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.