Familiar Stranger: Double Self-Portraiture in the Art of Howard Finster

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.