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Abstract
Self-taught visionary artist Howard Finster (1915–2001) is noted for his signature text-filled religious art and its connections to his creation of the landscape installation known as Paradise Garden in rural Georgia. Finster’s insistent and obsessive retelling of the religious visions that prompted his individual works of art—reputed to be in the tens of thousands—and Paradise Garden were key to establishing his considerable popularity and success in the art world. I examine the role of Finster’s text-filled painted and drawn self-portraits, which form a significant subset of his works, in his decades-long project of multi-media serial selfrepresentation and self-promotion. Before analyzing the relationships between text and image in some representative examples of Finster’s double self-portraits, I discuss the connections between visual and literary self-portraiture and the historical role of visual self-portraiture in the artist’s self-fashioning.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Omitted words and punctuation, and where meaning is obscured, misspellings in Finster’s writing in the self-portraits will be corrected. However, to best convey the visual effects of the writing, grammatical errors and most misspellings will remain uncorrected.
2 Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster. While no accurate count of Finster’s creations during this period is possible due to the sheer number of works and their widespread dissemination, the figure is easily in the tens of thousands. According to Robert Girardot, “If we accept the relative accuracy of Finster’s own numbering system, he died having finished his 46,991st painting” (47).
3 Finster’s published autobiographical work is admittedly difficult to categorize or even describe. One source of confusion is that three illustrated books with identical titles and featuring at least some first-person narratives by Finster were published in one year: Howard Finster: Stranger from Another World: Man of Visions Now on this Earth (with Tom Patterson, New York: Abbeville Press, 1989); Howard Finster, Man of Visions (with J. F. Turner, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989) and Howard Finster, Man of Visions (Atlanta: Peacthtree Press, 1989). Of the three, the “as-told-to” with Patterson conforms most closely to a standard autobiography: it recounts Finster’s life in chronological order and in first person. The Turner book is idiosyncratically hybrid in form: Some chapters feature only Finster’s voice–but in quotation marks. Other chapters read as biography, with Patterson narrating and interviewing Finster and his associates. The self-authored Peachtree Publishers book, the most idiosyncratic of the three, begins with an interview of Finster and concludes with an Afterword, both by Susie Mee; sandwiched between is a sprawling assemblage of photographs, newspaper clippings, images of Paradise Garden and Finster’s paintings, and original black-and-white drawings made for the book with Finster’s commentary drawn on the pages. In addition to these three books, Finster wrote a self-published science fiction-styled coloring book titled Howard Finster’s Vision of 1982: Vision of 2000 Light Years Away: Space Born of Three Generations from Earth to the Heaven of Heavens (1982), in which he depicts himself on a journey through outer space. Footage of Finster’s verbal self-narration can be seen in the documentary film Paradise Garden: Howard Finster’s Legacy (dir. Ava Leigh Stewart, ART West Film, 2014).
4 Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster, 116.
5 LeJeune, On Autobiography, 13–14. Thanks to the anonymous reader of an earlier version of this manuscript for pointing out how the placement of the self-portrait at the entrance of Paradise Garden can be seen as an autobiographical pact that serves as a “negotiation of entry” into the autobiographical space of the gardens, and for mentioning the resemblance to the opening of Rousseau’s Confessions.
6 Rousseau, Confessions, 17. Among the claims Rousseau makes in his metacommentary at the start of Book One of The Confessions, “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which when complete, will have no imitator… . Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but I am at least different.”
7 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 75.
8 Finster and Patterson, Stranger from Another World, 188–89.
9 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 75.
10 Hartigan, Made with Passion, 158. Curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, writing for the National Museum of American Art, referred to Finster as “perhaps the most famous religious artist alive today.” Girardot notes, “It has been said that at the height of his renown in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Finster had more one-man exhibitions at galleries and museums than any other living artist at the time” (36). Girardot adds that while most of these exhibitions would have been at “wannabe galleries jumping onto the outsider bandwagon,” Finster’s work was also featured at “the Venice Biennale, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Smithsonian, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of American Folk Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York” (n. 12, p. 225).
11 New York Times, “Howard Finster Dies.”
12 For the most comprehensive and in-depth analysis of Finster’s achievements, see Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster, 170–96 especially (U of California P, 2015). Although Girardot, a religion scholar, gives considerable attention to what he calls the “narrative armature” of Finster’s productions, his interest in the mythic dimensions of Finster’s self-fashioning lead him to focus on the artist’s Biblical sources and spirituality rather than his autobiographical acts, thus downplaying the sheer number of self-portraits Finster produced. See also Glen C, Davies, ed. Stranger in Paradise: The Works of Reverend Howard Finster (Krannart Art Museum 2010); Thelma Finster Bradshaw, Howard Finster: The Early Years: A Private Portrait of America’s Premier Folk Artist (Crane Hill, 2005); Matthew Sutton, “Little America: REM, Howard Finster, and the Southern “Outsider Art” Aesthetic” (Studies in Popular Culture 30.2, 1–20); and Jerry Cullum, “Howard Finster Retrospective Exhibition, Lehigh University, USA, October 2004.” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, March 2006, 140–42.
13 Fine, Everyday Genius, 3–4.
14 Fine, Everyday Genius, 68.
15 Eakin, Living Autobiographically, 15–22, 31–42.
16 Chambers, Facing It, 1. Thanks again to the anonymous reader of an earlier version of this manuscript, who pointed me towards Chambers’ theorization of the distinction between sincerity and truthfulness.
17 Chambers, Facing It, 2.
18 Ibid., 3.
19 See Chambers, Facing It, 9, where he argues that the diary form used in some AIDS memoirs lends a greater immediacy through its imperfections. Using the analogy of “the live,” in which a live broadcast will more often entail technical glitches that remind the viewer of the immediacy of the televised image compared to a “canned” production, Chambers claims, “The live can thus be said to cultivate a certain kind of ‘messiness’ as the very sign of its liveness, and this messiness can again be read polyvalently, functioning simultaneously as a signifier of disorder, entropy, and communicational ‘noise’…, as a marker of the live’s privileged relation, as mediation, to the living, and finally, as a factor of readability resulting from informational complexity [and] self-reflexivity… .” In short, Finster’s “messiness” acts as a visual cue to convey the haste with which he seeks to fulfill the divine commandment to “make sacred art” within the limits of his lifespan.
20 Wilson, Judgment and Grace, 83.
21 Finster and Turner, Man of Visions, 95.
22 Finster, Stranger from Another World, 32; Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster, 34.
23 Patterson, “Howard Finster,” 107. The longer quote introduced in the next sentence is from the same page.
24 Patterson, “Howard Finster,” 121.
25 Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster, 128. Finster narrated this account so many times in print, audio, and video (not to mention to thousands of individual visitors to Paradise Garden) that some inconsistencies exist between various articulations, including whether or not Finster recognized the voice as that of God or some other being. Noting the impossibility of establishing a definitive version, Girardot writes, “It would be an interesting exercise to compile as many different versions of the story as possible… . But the most important mythic truth of the story is that, despite various discrepancies in the details, the visionary armature or template remains the same. The core meaning of the event seems not to be the precise identity of the voice, but rather the basic fact that something extraordinary occurred… . His hidden cosmic identity as a prophetic sign-maker and stranger, destined to produce sacred art, was now fully revealed to himself and the rest of the world” (129).
26 Sutton, “Little America,” 8.
27 “The Foundation,” Paradise Garden website.
28 Howarth, “Some Principles.” 85.
29 Ibid.,” 85–6.
30 West, Portraiture, 179.
31 Salgado, “Mirrors,” 439.
32 Marcus, Autobiography, 90.
33 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 203.
34 West, Portraiture, 164.
35 Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 155.
36 Bond, “Performing the Self?,” 31.
37 West, Portraiture, 212.
38 Ibid., 205.
39 Chambers, Facing It, 1–3.
40 Here Finster can be seen to mirror a contemporary trend in formal art. See West, Portraiture, 212, where he notes of postmodern artists that “[t]heir primary concern may not be to convey a likeness of themselves but to reveal something more fundamental about themselves. “To illustrate his point, he describes a multi-media work by Tracy Emin titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” (1995). The piece “is composed of a tent, the inside of which has a series of lists, descriptions, and mementoes of people who have shared her bed—friends and family as well as sexual partners. Through works such as this Emin is able to challenge the traditional boundaries of self-portraiture” (212).
41 Since Finster cited the King James Bible exclusively in his sermons and art, I am quoting from that version of the Bible in this and subsequent quotes.
42 Girardot, Envisioning Howard Finster, 126.
43 Ibid., 54.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James H. Watkins
James H. Watkins is Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College, in Rome, Georgia. His work on autobiography and the U. S. South has appeared in The Southern Quarterly, The Mississippi Quarterly, The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Southern Selves: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing (Vintage 1998).