I visited Paradise Garden in early November 2024 and it’s definitely an experience.

Finster was from a large family in Alabama. He moved to Trion, Georgia in the 1940s and tried to build an art garden there, but ran out of land. So, he moved to the Summerville area just south of Trion in the 1960s and bought 4 acres.

The ‘garden’ that he created is a mix of folk art and outsider art, where he used found objects, molds, tiles, paintings… even shoes.

There are a lot of religious references in his work, which is not surprisingly, since he had visions at an early age, became deeply religious, and began preaching when he was 15. However, interspersed with that are UFOs, war iconography, a mountain of hub caps, and lots of other themes. There is a gallery on the property with a collection of Finster’s work.

There are various sheds and dwellings, such as the mirror house in the back of the property, which is the oldest part of the garden.

There is a wall that runs along a part of the property that is made of hub caps attached to a fence, covered with mortar and embedded with objects.

As I walked around, I noticed that there were numbers on the paintings, and my initial impression, was that perhaps it was perhaps part of some tracking system to keep the works organized. But that was not the case. Finster believed that God had asked him to ‘do 5,000 paintings’ to spread the gospel and so he started numbering them to keep count. He reached his 5,000th painting just before Christmas in 1985, and then continued to paint.

Finster began receiving publicity in the mid-1970s with his paintings going to the Library of Congress and also being displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC.

There’s also Finister’s connection with the bands, R.E.M. and The Talking Heads. Both used his art on their music covers.

I’m not sure how R.E.M. and Finster heard about each other, but the original video of R.E.M.’s Radio Free Europe was shot in Finster’s yard.

Summerville is only 90 minutes’ drive east of Atlanta and you can visit Paradise Gardens, Sunday through Saturday. The fee is $15 or $10 if you’re a senior.