In 1976, bicycle repairman and retired Baptist preacher Howard Finster became a visionary artist. It happened when he was repainting a white chassis, and a smudge of paint on his thumb took the form of a human face. The face told him to “paint sacred art.” And so he did.
Finster may be the most prolific artist in American history. From 1976 to his death in 2001, Finster made 46,991 paintings, each signed, dated, and numbered—a rate of about five paintings a day. They depicted an invented religious cosmology stretching far beyond the bounds of the Bible, encompassing far-off planets, asemic languages, and icons of American culture. It was a way for him to preach; though he’d retired from the Big Tent church circuit, he never gave up his itinerant tendencies. With his paintings, Finster shed his mortal coil, his message reaching more people than he could ever imagine.
Of course, not everyone took Finster seriously, at least not as a prophet. But his talent as an artist was undeniable. In no time, Finster’s home in Summerville, Georgia—Paradise Garden as it was called—became a site of pilgrimage. Students, mid-tier gallerists, and late-’80s celebrities like Keith Haring and Michael Stipe were regular visitors. By all accounts, Finster rarely slept. Instead, he was a formidable host and an obsessive artist, often simultaneously.
Growing up, my dad told me as much. His college friend was the son of one of the aforementioned mid-tier gallerists, and during break, he’d been tasked to pick up some of Finster’s works. My dad went along. It was the early ’90s; Finster would have been in his late seventies. When they arrived at Paradise Garden, they found Finster painting while watching NASCAR—“Come on in, boys.” From my dad’s account, Finster never stopped working. He talked to the two young men but didn’t look up. Fortunately, the young Mr. Reed had the foresight to buy the painting Finster had been working on. It was still wet when they left.
A decade later, I was born. When I was growing up, that painting sat on the highest shelf of a small bookcase in my dad’s office. It’s wooden, the painting, and its edges are cut into the shape of a miniature triceratops. The shelf rises six feet off the ground, and the painting is just under a foot wide and six inches tall, so my earliest encounters with it were always from a distance. Once, my dad took it down and told me about the strange, NASCAR-obsessed man who had painted and sold it to him in one sitting. But I preferred the triceratops as a distant oddity—always strange, always unfamiliar. Bright red, hypnotically patterned, and discordantly whimsical among the neighboring books and family photographs, it was like a beacon: something my attention could reach for but never fully grasp. When I was tall enough to take the painting down by myself, I read what was written on it:
MEET ME IN HEAVEN
BEYOND ALL WARS DEATH AND HELL.
TO LIVE IN
PEACE
6000.127 WORKS SINCE 1976 OVER-10-YEARS
WORK NIGHT AND DAY FOR YOU ALL
SOMMERVILLE GA. 30749
R-2-BOX 104-A
PH- 404) 857 – 29 – 25
GOD BLESS YOU ALL
It was the first time I had cared about a work of art. Maybe it was the unguarded dedication—“for you all”—audacious, in a way. I don’t know; you’ll have to trust me. What began as an oddity in my childhood became an obsession in adulthood.
So here we are. It’s spring 2025, and I’m at Paradise Garden. Trees are coming back, albeit slowly, and the sun’s out. After a winter in New Haven, I’m reminded of what good weather feels like. I’m smiling; my mom’s with me.
It was hard to get to. We rode along the base of the Smokies for what seemed like hours until a barely two-lane road took us from the main drive to the three-acre Garden.
The first thing I see is the tower—a three-story spired building called the “Folk Art Chapel.” The next thing I see is a mural done by Finster, cracked and fading. The lot is gravel. It costs fifteen dollars to get in, twelve with a student discount.
The place is not what it once was, but I expected as much. Most paintings and sculptures have been carried off to archives and museums; I’ve seen them on gallery walls. What’s left are the works not worth saving. They’re crumbling, a few years from disappearing if they’re not restored, and they likely won’t be. I’m left wondering how much it matters. I wonder if Finster would find it offensive that we keep it alive now that he’s gone.
Undoubtedly, this place is still his. It’s incredible, despite the decay, how much of it still radiates with Finster’s vigor and vision. Concrete sculptures of women and serpents dot the grass; the paths below us are embedded with marbles and glass shards. The sun reflects sharply everywhere, and my eyes are half-closed the whole way through. Water flows from nowhere, running in between and around shoddy wooden shacks and blooming beds. He had a knack for space and where things fit in it. Hundreds of rusted bicycle wheels are delicately organized against the side of his workshop. Trees are planted strategically, cans and hubcaps hanging on their limbs.
The oldest part of the garden has a tree house made of mirrors, and I enter. I see myself at every angle. I’m looking for something here. It’s hard to tell if I’ve felt it.
I’m near the center now, walking through the door of a plywood chapel. A hundred feet ahead rises a massive cylinder—fifty feet wide and thirty feet high. Like an enormous drill core, the bottom half is a light brown; it seemed to have been pulled straight out of the felsic soil. The top half is green, just like the grass growing at the cylinder’s base. But as I walk closer, the bottom half unravels into discernible, snaking forms. Only then do I see what the thing really is—a massive construction made of bicycle parts and dozens of trees growing up, within, and through its frame.
The tree branches are nearly indistinguishable from the rusted metal parts, each having developed the same green-grey splotches of lichen. They intertwine indiscriminately, branches rising through wheels and gears, trying to reach the sun. The whole thing is contained by a bicycle-part retaining wall. A circle of chassis rises from the ground like fence posts. Wires wrap it to keep its shape. It is a sculpture and not a sculpture. It is evidence of hundreds of children growing up, coming and going. Each part is a maker of a kind; the bikes force the branches to redirect, and when the branches refuse, they lift the bicycles with them.
We spend an hour there, my mom and I. I buy a poster on my way out, and we try to talk about what we liked. Are there words? It’s a pleasure to be so close to the remnants of such creative force. The pleasure is in the clash. None of this should be here, yet it is.