'Sermons in Paint': Baptist Artist Howard Finster

ATLANTA (AP) - The Rev. Howard Finster, a 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.

The folk artist died of congestive heart failure at a hospital near his rural home in the town of Summerville, Ga.

	Seeing Angels, Sharing Visions In a 1996 interview, Finster discusses salvation, museum placards, and how God called him to sacred art.

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.

His widest exposure may have been from album 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 rock group of former art students, commissioned Finster for the cover of its "Little Creatures" album.

"He took the word of God and did it entirely in his own way, this eccentric, unconventional manner," said Lynne Spriggs, folk art curator at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, which holds the world's largest collection of Finster works. "He was a tireless artist and a great teacher."

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