Damn, a week late but anyhow, RIP Howard finster! Folk artist, minister Howard Finster dies Associated Press SUMMERVILLE, Ga. -- The Rev. Howard Finster, the backwoods Baptist preacher whose eccentric paintings teeming with childlike, colorful images and religious messages appeared on the covers of rock albums and in galleries around the world, died Monday. He was 84. Finster created simple, two-dimensional paintings in bright colors and distorted proportions, imbuing his works with evangelical themes that exhort the viewer to repent and to accept Christ. Many of his works were crowded with messages like "Hell is a hell of a place" scrawled in crooked block letters. He called them "sermons in paint." He often used pop culture icons such as the Coca-Cola bottle, Cadillacs and Elvis Presley in his works, which also included crude carvings and cutouts. "When Christ called his disciples, he called fishermen; he didn't call nobody from a qualified university," Finster said in a 1990 magazine interview. "He used common people to reveal parables. That's what I do. I use Elvis because I'm a fan of Elvis. Elvis was a great guy. By using him I get people's attention, and they read my messages." Finster began his art career in his late 40s. He was considered a pioneer among unschooled artists. "He was an introduction to this art for a lot of individuals who had never heard of it," said Marcia Weber, a gallery owner in Montgomery, Ala., who has handled several Finster paintings. "He broke ground." Finster's work became popular in the early 1980s in New York art galleries and elsewhere. In the Houston area, Finster was included in such landmark group shows as Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980, presented by the Rice Museum in 1983, and was spotlighted in two solo exhibits -- an untitled overview at the Galveston Arts Center in 1986 and in the traveling show The Road to Heaven Is Paved by Good Works: The Art of Reverend Howard Finster, hosted by the Blaffer Gallery of the University of Houston in 1990. Finster's widest exposure may have been from music cover art. The Georgia-based rock band R.E.M. asked Finster to make the cover for its 1984 album, Reckoning. A year later, Talking Heads, a musical group of former art students, commissioned Finster for the cover of its "Little Creatures" recording. http://www.finster.com/
I went to a Folk Art exhibit a few years ago and saw a bunch of Finster's work-- really interesting. I bought a piece by B.F. Pierce.
