Garde Rail Gallery - Howard Finster

Howard Finster was born in 1916 in Valley Head, Alabama, where he dropped out of school in the sixth grade. As a young man he moved to northwest Georgia and became a Baptist minister. He led a number of congregations until retiring in 1965, when he became a bicycle-, lawn mower-, and television-repairman. At about this time he also began elaborating the vacant land around his repair shop into a four-acre environment he called his Paradise Garden and Plant Farm Museum. He had built similar decorated gardens near some of his previous homes but never on such a large scale. Ten years later he began the first of his "sermons in paint," two-dimensional paintings on plywood, mirrors, glass, and any other available surface upon which he could render his evangelistic spiritual messages. On October 22, 2001, Howard Finster passed away, and had completed more than 46,000 works of art.