Fwd: Howard Finster RIP
StepCher@aol.com
StepCher@aol.com
Tue, 23 Oct 2001 13:06:52 EDT
--part1_85.11d685fc.2906fdac_boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
--part1_85.11d685fc.2906fdac_boundary
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Disposition: inline
Return-path: <Rrose13@aol.com>
From: Rrose13@aol.com
Full-name: Rrose13
Message-ID: <89.dd1663d.2906fc52@aol.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 13:01:06 EDT
Subject: Howard Finster RIP
To: StepCher@aol.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="part2_85.11d685fc.2906fc52_boundary"
X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Mac sub 39
--part2_85.11d685fc.2906fc52_boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
--part2_85.11d685fc.2906fc52_boundary
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Disposition: inline
Return-Path: <wdrigby@mindspring.com>
Received: from rly-yg01.mx.aol.com (rly-yg01.mail.aol.com [172.18.147.1]) by air-yg02.mail.aol.com (v82.14) with ESMTP id MAILINYG22-1023121127; Tue, 23 Oct 2001 12:11:27 -0400
Received: from hall.mail.mindspring.net (hall.mail.mindspring.net [207.69.200.60]) by rly-yg01.mail.aol.com (v81.9) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINYG14-1023121105; Tue, 23 Oct 2001 12:11:05 -0400
Received: from mindspring.com (DIALUP-153-9.TNNAS2.USIT.NET [216.80.153.9])
by hall.mail.mindspring.net (8.9.3/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA24209
for <rrose13@aol.com>; Tue, 23 Oct 2001 12:11:01 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <3BD59692.CD10C099@mindspring.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:10:59 -0500
From: Will Rigby <wdrigby@mindspring.com>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; I; PPC)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Stephanie Chernikowski <rrose13@aol.com>
Subject: [Fwd: FW: Howard Finster RIP]
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="------------396D1A1327D4D1ECA323F984"
--------------396D1A1327D4D1ECA323F984
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
note complete lack of reference to REM...
he also got an obit on NPR.
--------------396D1A1327D4D1ECA323F984
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Return-Path: <phastman@pipeline.com>
Received: from smtp10.atl.mindspring.net ([207.69.200.246])
by osgood.mail.mindspring.net (Earthlink Mail Service) with ESMTP id ttb4kq.eej.37kbi1v
Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:54:01 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from [165.247.28.175] (user-2ive75f.dialup.mindspring.com [165.247.28.175])
by smtp10.atl.mindspring.net (8.9.3/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA07911;
Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:51:35 -0400 (EDT)
User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 11:52:17 -0400
Subject: FW: Howard Finster RIP
From: El Rapido <phastman@pipeline.com>
To: <phastman@mac.com>
Message-ID: <B7FB0A71.893%phastman@pipeline.com>
In-Reply-To: <151.2dfd4a5.2906587c@aol.com>
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
October 23, 2001
The Rev. Howard Finster, Georgia Folk Artist, Dies at 84
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
oward Finster, a Baptist preacher whose evangelical faith, outgoing
personality and compulsive work habits made him one of the most prominent
and prolific folk artists of the 20th century, died yesterday in a hospital
in Rome, Ga. He was 84 and lived in Summerville, Ga., a few miles from the
Paradise Garden, the junk-and-cement environment that brought him his first
recognition in the middle 1970's.
His death was announced on his Web site, www.finster.com, and on his phone
message at 1-800-FINSTER. Both said that "he is more alive now than he ever
has been" and that "he never met a person that he didn't love."
By the time he died, Mr. Finster, who called himself a "second Noah," was a
celebrity in his own right. He played his banjo on Johnny Carson's
television show, designed an award- winning record album cover for the
Talking Heads and executed paintings to hang in the Library of Congress. He
appeared at folk music festivals, a conference on Elvis and art schools
around the country.
Lee Kogan, director of the Folk Art Institute at the American Museum of Folk
Art, called him "one of the most important self-taught artists of the 20th
century" and cited his ability to "imaginatively transform humble everyday
material others would call junk." She noted that a wire construction of a
train in the museum's collection includes a long written list of possible
art materials that begins, "There is no limit what you can make with fence
wire, yard chairs, tables, houses. . . ."
A list of the detritus that went into Mr. Finster's Paradise Garden, located
90 miles northwest of Atlanta, would probably fill a book. The other
cornerstone of his fame is his densely apocalyptic text-image paintings,
which he seemed to produce at assembly-line rates. Their lush, extravagantly
crowded surfaces form latter-day illuminated manuscripts and cover subjects
that include heaven and hell, tales from the Bible and American history and
popular culture.
But his prominence was certainly aided by his stream-of-consciousness talk,
his combination of modesty and absolute certainty in both his faith and his
talent, and his nonstop religious visions. He claimed to have had his first
at the age of 3 when he was visited by his dead sister, Abby.
Mr. Finster's work emerged at a time when traditional definitions of folk
art were being expanded to include a diverse range of faith-driven,
stylistically raw work known as outsider art that was frequently made by
Southern blacks and whites who eked out livings as farmers or repairmen. Mr.
Finster both benefited from and helped define this change.
While other outsider giants like Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor and Henry
Darger were discovered after their deaths, Mr. Finster was very much alive.
He reveled in the attention, seeing it as a means to spread the word of God.
He once told an interviewer that he was drawn to Elvis Presley not so much
for his music but because "he could have won more souls than anybody in the
world."
His work also dovetailed with developments in contemporary art, specifically
the return of figurative painting in the 1980's.
Mr. Finster was born in 1916 in Valley Head, Ala., one of the 13 children of
Samuel and Lula A. Finster. He left school at 14 after completing the sixth
grade and became a Baptist preacher two years later. In 1935 he married
Pauline Freeman, who survives him along with four daughters, Earlene Brown,
Gladys Wilson and Beverly Finster, all of Summerville, and Thelma Bradshaw
of Conyers, Ga.; a son, Roy Finster, of Summerville; and 15 grandchildren,
more than 20 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Over the next three decades he toured Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee
preaching at tent revivals and conducting baptisms, weddings and funerals.
In an effort to reach more people, he published his sermons in local
newspapers at his own expense. He also began to write poetry, both about
preaching and about his job in a fabric mill.
In 1941 he settled with his family in Trion, Ga., supporting them by doing
carpentry, plumbing and even house building, as well as Finster's Arts &
Crafts, which produced "family picture" clocks by the hundreds. He also
began repairing and rebuilding bicycles to sell cheaply to families that
could not afford new ones.
His art evolved organically out of his activities as a preacher and his
growing body of self-taught artisanal knowledge. His first combinations of
words and images occurred in the blackboard diagrams that he made while
teaching Sunday school and called "chalkwork."
He began to build his first garden museum in Trion in 1945. In 1961 he
bought land in Pennville, Ga., just outside Summerville, and began
constructing the Paradise Garden. Over an infrastructure of bicycle frames,
he fashioned a concrete surface of sculptured faces, figures and animals and
expanses of exuberant mosaic incorporating bottle caps, jewelry, glass,
machine parts, dashboard figures, even his son's tonsils in a jar.
In 1981 Mr. Finster expanded the garden in an adjacent lot with an abandoned
church, converting the structure into the World's Folk Art Church by adding
a 16-sided cupola that he built without plans. By the late 1970's, the
garden was a pilgrimage for folk-art groupies and religious believers alike,
the East Coast equivalent of Simon Rodia's great Watts Towers in Los
Angeles.
Mr. Finster began to paint in 1976 after an image appeared on his thumb
while he was painting a bicycle. His paintings, which have the same crowded
lushness as the garden and are more intricately interwoven with language,
were not limited to flat surfaces, but spread across objects, like shoes,
metal barrels, gourds, even his white Cadillac.
Mr. Finster had his first solo show in a commercial gallery at Phyllis Kind
Gallery in Chicago in 1979, and another at Ms. Kind's New York gallery in
1981. His work is in the collections of dozens of museums.
Until slowed by illness and rheumatism, Mr. Finster worked incessantly,
carefully numbering each effort. A 1995 article in The New York Times began
by noting that he was finishing up his 36,892nd piece of art. He said he
slept in his clothes and subsisted on 20-minute naps, working around the
clock.
In a 1989 monograph by J. F. Turner, Mr. Finster said he did not fear death.
"Death is not my problem. My problem is getting all my jobs done well before
I leave, for I know there's nothing to do in the holy land where I am
going."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company |
----------
From: DethRokrX@aol.com
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 01:22:04 EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Fwd: Howard Finster RIP
Howard Finster went to be with the Lord Oct. 22, 2001. He is with a Band Of
Angels, his arms are open wide and he has the most beautiful smile on his
face. He is more alive now than he ever has been. He is coming back with
those angels to get us. So be ready to go. He will always be alive here and
in our hearts. Remember one thing about him, "He never met a person that he
didn't Love."
Paradise Gardens is temporarily closed.
--------------396D1A1327D4D1ECA323F984--
--part2_85.11d685fc.2906fc52_boundary--
--part1_85.11d685fc.2906fdac_boundary--