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Howard Finster
December, 1986

All the people is god’s people, just like all the trees out there. I love everybody in this world and I want to help everbody in this world. It’s not possible for one person to help all of em but I can help a few million.

I’m tryin to get my message out to the world. I have as many sinner friends as I do religious friends. I try to treat everyone the same: infidels, atheists, American-born, Commonist. They all want my work. A lot of em don’t want no religion on the work, and I do a few pieces. I try to give it to em. That’s their belief and that’s their right. I don’t condemn anyone for their beliefs. I just try to tell the world there is a better place for em. A lot of em don’t know that.

This finger here has rubbed a lot of paintings. Looks like there wouldn’t be no finger left. There shouldn’t be nothing but bone. Big paintings, four foot paintings. Put your basic coat on and then put all kinds of colors on while it’s wet. The paint dries so fast I can only do a little patch at a time. Something you do with your finger, there’s a touch in it that brush won’t put it in there. Strange how it all happens, how it does happen.

All my stuff is sacred. Visions I have tell me how to do em. I see them before I do em. It’s like the pictures you been doing here tonight. They’re there but you have to pull em out and hold em up to light, see the negative. That’s the way with me. When a negative comes on my brain, I think I have to look at that, I have to do that.

I had a vision one night. I had a vision something was happening deep in the earth. I seen these animals coming out of these dens and holes and caves, strange animals and nobody didn’t know they was in there just coming up out of the earth and I put on this painting is this real animals I see or is this disease coming up out of the earth or is this poison a volcano. This is what I was putting in the painting and it flashed on the screen that in Africa poison gas was coming up out of a volcano. There were whole dead herds of sheep and whole families dead. I had that vision probably while it was happening.

Elvis. Cutest little fella here. I just want to hug his neck. I went up to his mansion with this San Francisco TV company. Three days after I went to his home he appeared to me in this garden. He walked up behind me while I was stooped over working in a flower bed and felt someone behind me. I looked around and there he stood. He was wearin a dark blue pair of pants, light blue shirt, open collar. And when I seen him, I couldn’t believe it. I just turned back around and started working in the flower bed wondering if he was really alive and I said, "Elvis come stay with me a while." And he said, "I can’t I have a really tight schedule."He was a humble person. He stimalated a young nation. Stimalated em. Built em up. Put some pick up in em, pick up. I had a feeling that God meant for him to preach the last five years of his life. He would have reached more young people than any other man who walked this earth. I felt like he had a calling to God. And I had a vision that when he died God was the last one he called on. The Bible says that in the last days whosoever shall call his name shall be saved and I believe he was.

I’m trying to stay here as long as I can. I’d a whole lot rather be in the next world, but I got a job here and I don’t want to leave without fulfilling it.

A Visit to Paradise Garden
by Stephanie Chernikowski

In December of 1986, an acquaintance invited me to ride shotgun on a southbound journey to the earthly paradise in Summerville, Georgia, that Howard Finster calls home.

Around 3 in the afternoon on Saturday we walk into Howard Finster’s home and studio. On the way in, we pass a freeform structure resembling a miniature Gaudi cathedral, the gates to Paradise Garden, and a real life version of the "mansion" that recurs in the paintings. Angels point our way and whimsical renderings of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln greet us at the door.

Inside the room is stifling. The space heater burns full tilt. Howard has arthritis in his shoulder and needs to keep warm. We find him hunched at his easel, an unfinished board on which a cut plywood "Howlin’ Wolf" hangs on nails. His painting hand is supported by the other to steady it; his failing eyes squint to slits. He looks up to greet us. A woman from Kentucky is introduced with "... but I cain’t sell her nuthin’. Mah gallery in Palm Beach and mah gallery in See-attle and mah gallery in Los Angelees..." It is a rap he repeats regularly–demands exceed his ability to supply. Especially now, immediately before Christmas.

He seems to paint around the clock, pausing only to greet his endless guests and to rest briefly on the sofa when his body becomes too weary to hold him upright any longer. He eats when his wife brings a plate of food to the studio. From the time we arrive until we leave, to my knowledge he never sleeps at all. I am invited to sleep in the room off the studio. When I awake each morning, the paintings he has done in the night are the first thing I see. There are always new ones.

Howard announces that "R.E.M." came by last week to bring him herbs for his shoulder. That had to be Michael Stipe.

Monday, the morning of our departure, I am awakened by a fragile voice in the next room singing of another world. Like a snake who hears a charmer, I slither through the curtain into the room where Howard works to see a free form wood scrap alive with joyful creatures and words of wisdom, "Keep your Brain under Controll" and "have a good cover on your head when the stars fall." It has been an inspired night for him.

"Sometimes I hear voices," he smiles when he realizes I have entered.

Yes.

Texas born Stephanie Chernikowski moved to New York in 1975, where an embryonic punk music/ art scene offered inspiration for her early photographs. Her work has appeared in numerous films, videos, CDs, books and periodicals including The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and in photographic exhibitions in the United States and Europe. In 1996, 2.13.61 Publications published Chernikowski’s book of photographs called Dream Baby Dream: Images from the Blank Generation, and the next year she was project coordinator of Blank Generation Revisited: the Early Days of Punk Rock.