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Lovers Leap – Sri Lanka

Ravana’s Cleft, Trincomalee. Seen from the Swami rock (West). credit AntanO/Anton, 2014. Used under creative common license

Courtesy of Google Alerts–a far flung (pardon the pun) Lovers Leap to add to our ‘inventory’ of world Leaps: Sri Lanka in the 17th century. Among destinations featured in The Sunday Observer, “the oldest and most circulated weekly English-language newspaper in Sri Lanka since 1928,” is the dramatic plunge of a heartbroken maiden into an angry sea:

“The story of Lovers Leap is a sorrowful tale of unrequited love in which Francina Van Rheed, the daughter of a Dutch official, engaged to a young Dutch officer who broke off the engagement upon the end of his foreign service. Forsaken and distraught, she watched atop Swami Rock as the vessel carrying her faithless lover passed beyond the horizon in 1687. Overcome by sorrow, she flung herself into the violent sea – a drop of 400 feet.”

Had we known of this dramatic location and heart breaking tale, it would have made our book, Lovers Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. Lovers Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

Valentine’s Day approaches – Lovers Leaps again in the public imagination: Brimham Rocks

All hail, Google Alerts!

We’re still keeping up on the worldwide phenomena of Lover’s Leaps … the geography that gives real meaning to the phrase “Til death do us part.”  As we pointed out in Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, this is a tale that has come down through millennia (“back in the mists of time,” says Great British Life) from all corners of the globe.

7 romantic walks for Valentine’s day in Yorkshire

Lovers’ Leap – Brimham Rocks

Go to Brimham Rocks and share a story that’s been embedded in the stone (and local folklore) for generations. It’s said that way back in the mists of time, Edwin and Julia were madly in love but were forbade to see each other. Unable to face life apart, they decided to leap from the rocks and spend eternity together. Fortunately, instead of plummeting to their deaths in a gory tumble of limbs and teeth, the couple floated gently to the ground in such a miraculous fashion that Julia’s disapproving father changed his mind and consented to their marriage. Their launch pad to matrimony is now fondly known as Lovers’ Leap.

The tale they recount here differs from the one we found in that today’s tale has both lovers leaping while the 1884 legend we include in the book has only Miss Royst taking the despairing leap. Both have the saving grace of a ballooning skirt saving the day (er – life/lives).

From Lover’s Leap Legends, page 220:

Brimham Rocks (left) are fifty acres of the grit of millstone (a sand-stone once used to grind grain) shaped by weathering and exfoliation into bizarre configurations. These “curious” rock formations not only have a Lover’s Leap, some are thought to resemble elephants, bears, and hippos. It is claimed a few have a Druid or Devil connection. The highest is called Lover’s Leap. In “1766 or 1767,” reported The Leeds Mercury of October 11, 1884, “a young woman . . . by the name of Royst on being disappointed in love, determined to destroy herself by leaping”:

A strong wind was blowing from the west at the time, which inflated her dress in such a manner that she made the descent comparatively unharmed, in the adjoining field, and instead of breaking her neck, only sprained her thumb. She made no attempt to repeat the experiment, which probably cured her hopeless passion, as she lived long afterwards, and died at Kirby Overblow.


Lens & Pen is having a warehouse sale. All titles are now 50% off, postage paid. Lover’s Leap Legends is now $17.50, postage paid (original retail price $35). See our store 

The saga of young anti-moderns settling in a region renowned for its pre-modern image is the subject of an intriguing new book, “WHERE MISFITS FIT: COUNTERCULTURE AND INFLUENCE IN THE OZARKS”

American youth dissatisfied with mainstream values in the 1960s and ‘70s expressed their rebellion in a number of ways. Men grew long hair. They marched for women’s lib and Black civil rights. Protests against the Vietnam war led the nightly news. Free love, pot, LSD, and Bob Dylan were in. A counterculture fundamental was a belief that industrialization degraded the environment. Harmony with nature was soulful.

Hippies founded communes to grow their own food, enjoy clean air and water, and do as they pleased without the interference of squares and killjoys. A few of these idealistic, back-to-the-landers headed for the hills and hollers of the Ozarks, copies of The Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalogue in their rucksacks.Thomas Kersen

In the 1970s author Thomas Michael Kersen’s 29-year-old father, Michael Kersen, quit his managerial job at a fast-food restaurant in El Paso, packed his family, and, with some friends, lit out for an 80-acre patch of property in the wilds of the Arkansas Ozarks. They wintered in a shack without electricity or running water. When it rained, he and his sister stuffed newspapers (unsuccessfully) in holes in the roof.

Like similar groups, the Kersens were unschooled in agriculture, underfunded, and oddly unaware of other colonies. The middle-class urban youth, many college-educated, respected the music, crafts and survival skills of old-timers and sometimes bonded with their backcountry neighbors. Conservative retirees, who were also attracted by the cheap land, were more likely to take exception to counterculture lifestyles.

Despite the vividly described hardships, the experience was stimulating for young Kersen. He is today an associate professor of sociology at Jackson State University, Mississippi. During the pursuit of his PhD from Mississippi State University he became aware of the complexities of Southern identities. Southern Missouri and northern Arkansas are not “Dixie” but have Southern components. Like Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the American frontier, Professor Kersen thinks the Ozarks is also a “transformational space”:

In the case of my research, I consider the Ozarks itself a liminal place; it is a “betwixt and between” region at the crossroads of various types of cultural heritages, and one in which isolation and independence spurred a diverging culture.

This “betwixt and between” state of the Ozarks often puts the region and its inhabitants in a situation of challenging normative structure of society at all levels. The region abounds with blurred boundaries such as southern/nonsouthern, past/future, and individualistic/communalistic. It also attracts people who live on the margins of society, sometimes known as tricksters, or “edgemen” as Turner called them. Last, when looking at the Ozarks, one is confronted with the question of whether the region “live(s) with and in the nation as a whole” and how the nation regards the region.

The liminal nature of the Ozarks fosters eccentricity and creativity. The Ozarks has also captured the imagination of people outside the region and motivated them to engage in alternative or countercultural activities. The region has lured all types of edgemen and women: folks that were part of counterculture groups, communards, cultists, and UFO enthusiasts. In addition to fringe groups, reporters, Hollywood personalities, and other key figures in popular culture have found the mythopoetic aspects of the region exciting to explore and exploit. Al Capp used Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch, a mythic Ozarks, to explore social problems. Even real towns, such as Eureka Springs, have a long history as places many people believe possess a mystical energy vortex. To a greater extent than in other regions, some Americans sought an idealized version of the Ozarks to found communes and follow back-to-the-land practices.

Moving past previous research that discusses the Ozarks as a unique region, I argue that the Ozarks is a liminal region, or a “thin place.” They are a place that defies conventional categorization and often attracts creative, often marginal people. The Ozarks are where the sacred and paranormal worlds are close by. Such places, like the town of Eureka Springs, foster inclusiveness, and creativity. This live-and-let-live attitude was attractive to communal folk who wanted to make their lives and the world a better place. It is also a region that appealed to the religious devout, LGBT individuals, alternative economic practitioners, and others as somewhere they could live more freely and openly than was the case in most other regions.

Wrote Kersen: “In the pages to follow, I use my sociological imagination as a scaffolding for the narrative about the Ozarks, modernity, and popular culture. Part of the sociological imagination depends on exploring the cultural and historical contexts that have shaped the lives of a number of different groups that have called the Ozarks home.”

Indeed, few books on the Ozarks mention Oswald Spengler, Soren Kierkegaard, Max Weber, or Paul Tillich. The book does evidence a familiarity with standard Ozark history and literature: “The Ozark Symposium has been the springboard from which much of what is in this book began. I will always be grateful that Brooks Blevins was the first to invite me to come and hear the various presenters. After that first visit, I was hooked and have faithfully attended every year.”

Some of Kersen’s interpretations are unorthodox, such as considering Li’l Abner a “trickster”—a mythic character known for his defeat of conventionality and disrespect for authority. Inserting a Jungian archetype in an Ozark book is an example of his “sociological imagination.” Al Capp’s hunky hillbilly hero is not usually considered devious or clever.

“Where misfits fit” is a phrase that has been applied to Eureka Springs, Arkansas for decades. Founded on a misconception that its numerous springs had medical benefits, the town attracted schemers and dreamers a century before the influx of counterculture youth. A haven for writers and artists, it was hip before there were hippies. Kersen describes the relative harmony the bohemian resort town achieved between its liberal constituents and the builders of a Christian theme park. Anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith never fully realized his dreams, but he did live long enough to create a 65-foot statue of Christ and found an outdoor drama, The Great Passion Play. Due to the financial benefits derived from these attractions, town fathers overlooked Smith’s bigoted past. So too have the newly arrived counter-culturalists. “Development and money making are very important,” wrote Kersen.

Eureka Springs Centennial mural by Louis Freund, 1979. This former Victorian spa in the hills of northwest Arkansas became a haven for folky bohemians when faith in spring-water cures died. It was a perfect habitat for counter-cultural idealists in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Eureka Springs Art Wall is a city and arts council project. The Plywood panels painted by local high school students often illustrate the hippie influence on the town’s image. A few miles north, Lothlorian Commune builds an impressive wood geodesic dome. Like many, back-to-the-land ventures, it folded after a decade. Many of its idealistic members went on to successful professional careers, several achieving doctorate degrees. Basically, the book advocates the idea that the countercultural invasion of the Ozarks has been overall beneficial.

The hippie era contributions to Ozark music are discussed. Several rock bands achieved, at least for a time, national recognition. Black Oak Arkansas, though from a small delta community of that name, did repair between tours to a 1,300-acre commune twenty miles from Mountain Home. Given that the trickster exhibits “unbridled sexuality” and Black Oak’s music was uninhibited, Kersen considers them, like Li’l Abner, tricksters.

Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the other regional group to achieve fame, wasn’t as “misfit” as the bad boys from Black Oak: “Many of the songs are set in dreams and mythic places that emphasize ambiguous or indeterminant facets of liminal space. Often, these fables focus on the wanderer, the homebody, modernity, and nostalgia.”

He met with members of a little-known band who personified, in his mind, the Ozark back-to-the-land movement:

…the Hot Mulch Band arose out of the region’s communal efforts, and thus, it emerged as the musical expression of alternative living in the Ozarks. Indeed, the band epitomized the cultural and creative matrix of the region and showed people that there was a third way to life rather than left or right. … Many back-to-landers in the Missouri Ozarks were focused on living harmoniously with nature, each other, and with their neighbors. Such living is a form of communitas that linked a reverence of nature and highlighted sustainable energy and food practices.

Indeed a 1981 song by the Hot Mulch Band, Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak, is an anthem to the movement:

Well, I’m moving to the country where
Everything is fine, I’m
Gonna live in a dome and drink dandelion
Wine and
When the collapse comes I won’t get the
Blues
I’ll have all the back issues of the Mother
Earth News.

I’ll get my little sweetie and my
Volkswagon Van
See the real-estate man and buy me
Some land
A few acres cleared with lots of trees
A place
That we can fix up however we please

We’ll get our eggs from chickens and
Milk from a cow
A horse that plows and book that tells
How
An organic garden growin’ comfrey and
Peas
Getting honey from our bees and fruit
From our trees

Self-sufficient, well that’s the name of the
Game, I’m
Gonna get myself a system self contained
A wind mill to give me my electricity
No phone in my dome I’ll use ESP

No more Coca Cola, stop eating
Trash
Get into plantin’ gonna grow my own
Stash
Plant by the moon and talk to my plants
Consult the I Ching and learn to do a rain
Dance
Get into harmony with Nature and the Universe
I’ll do Yoga in the morning if my back
Don’t get worse

Red Zinger Tea and Vitamin B-6
One keeps me high the other keeps off
Ticks

Listen to Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak,

If Kersen’s “sociological imagination” is occasionally professorial, overall, the book is thoughtful and original. His coverage of bands with a back-to-the-land tie-in and the fate of various communes is noteworthy. In the final three chapters, the author affirms his belief that the overall influence of these idealistic, neo-Romantic, often educated young rebels on the region has been positive.

Misfits fits nicely with an earlier book, Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks by Jared M. Phillips whom Kersen references. Both college professors are in sympathy with the liberal beliefs and agendas of the young Ozark immigrants. They do realistically point out examples of their naïveté and agricultural inexperience. Persisting groups have overcome their initial ignorance and some have even prospered.

One might think the influx of pot-smoking, anti-establishment rebels would clash with conservative natives. For the most part, they were tolerated. Kersen’s book makes the point the Ozarks has historically been a refuge for those out-of-step with the dominant culture. Misfits and hipbillies fit in remarkably well and when their ventures flopped it was not due to the prejudice of locals. It’s a neat trick reconciling personal recollections with two distinct mythos—the old traditional history and newer hippie experiences, but Thomas Kersen has done an artful job.

Where Misfits Fit is available from the University Press of Mississippi  for $25 (paperback) plus postage.

EXTRAORDINARY PORTRAITS OF ORDINARY PEOPLE

This collection of short stories by Steve Wiegenstein describes quirky small town and rural Ozarkers, both realistically and compassionately. If they are all crazily dysfunctional he doesn’t come down too hard on them for their lack of comprehension of the world around them. Chronicles of the clueless make for interesting reading. These are enormously enjoyable tales. Often the marginalized are described with unrealistic, gummy sympathies that are in fact thinly disguised condescension. Slice-of-life literature often has an ideological point—the characters being pawns of a political point of view. His characters may be in difficult circumstances, but they don’t come off as victims. That makes them more alive than much fiction about ordinary folks. These are very real screwballs, wonderfully set in out of the way places—like the scattered lights you see from an airplane traveling between coasts.

Some short “Discussion Questions” are in the back of the book: “Although the stories are set in the Ozarks, do you see them as having wider significance about people and life in general?”

William Faulkner’s Mississippi is also populated by intriguing eccentrics, but Wiegenstein’s style isn’t Faulkner-esque. His sentences are way too short for one thing. That there are some similarities indicates Wiegenstein’s stories have “wider significance.”

Leland thought the tales oddly Fellini-esque—indicating a very much “wider significance”—not like the surrealism of the Italian filmmaker’s wild indifference to chronological time and juxtapositions of supreme strangeness, but rather in his poetic naturalism. Fellini has a similar love of ordinary folk and forgiveness of their profound misconceptions and occasional violence. Scattered Lights stories are quite cinematic as well. Leland said, “As I read on, I began hearing Nina Rota for the score, not fiddles or banjoes. Pulling up some Rota scores on YouTube, I read more of the stories as Rota’s wistful music played and it was indeed a wondrous fit.”

Check out Steve’s blog while you’re at it!

SURREAL 1907 OSAGE RIVER POSTCARD

What in the world is that ball on a stick that pokes up from the bottom left of this real photo postcard marked, “Osage River”?  It’s credited to “Becraft Photog. (21).” We have half a dozen of his mostly of Osceola and the upriver spa, Monegaw Springs, cards. In our book Damming the Osage (page 7) we used a wonderful image of his that shows a 68 lb. blue cat proudly displayed by two men and a boy on the streets of that old river town.

This enigmatic view is postmarked “Monegaw Springs Aug. 23, 1907.” It was addressed to Miss Mary Mifflin Kansas City, Mo: “Dear Sister, this is a splendid picture of the Osage. Having a royal good time. Am rather used to the strange country ways by now … lovingly, Edna.”  “Strange country” indeed—what IS that ball on a stick?

Did surrealism, the art of incongruous imagery, hit the Ozarks a decade before the term was even coined in Paris?  If you’ve got any idea what that ball and stick are please let us know at lensandpen@yahoo.com

LOOK DOWN—A SHARK!

Several nights after I caught the lookdown at a Marathon, Florida boat slip, I looked down and glimpsed something much bigger. Someone had cleaned fish and dumped the remains in the ocean. That attracted a sizable shark. The operator of a small charter boat walked by, looked in the water and asked me if I “want to have some fun?” He was docked several slips down.  A few minutes later I was hooked up with a “belly button” that supported a good-sized Penn reel and short stiff rod. Impaled on a big hook, at the end of a wire leader, was half of a four-pound mackerel. He tossed it in and almost instantly the shark took the bait.

Capt. Bill loosened the drag (I had no idea how to work the reel) only a few feet before the beast would have dragged me into the water. I have no idea how long the fight went on but I was relieved when he ran to his boat and came back with a gaff. This all took place next to the highway. While I was having “fun” a small crowd assembled to see the shark played and then hung up by its tail.

When I returned the next morning, a photographer from the local paper was there. That photo and clipping have been lost, but a week ago, going through some old boxes of drawer junk, this snapshot turned up. That’s me at 23 on the left and on the right is Capt. Bill Cross of the charter boat, No Moleste.

I didn’t paint the biggest fish I ever caught.  During the day, someone unceremoniously dragged the fish down to the edge of the ocean. While I was trying to cut out his jaws, a young guy from Chicago and his wife strolled by. To the disapproval of his wife, he offered me $50 for the trophy, including the knife I was using. It was a cheap knife and not very sharp and I wasn’t making much progress, so I took his offer. I took the money and quickly departed. He took over the futile task.

Leland Payton, Lookdown on Ice, 1963 watercolor on paper, 18 x 24.

I did a series of watercolors in the Keys in 1963. A few years later, I studied briefly with my hero Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League in New York. Before I left New York, I asked him to critique my watercolors. He had a problem with me using so much cross-hatching, but he did like the Lookdown painting. I offered it to him, but he said, “An artist never gives his work away.”  “How about a quarter,” I said.  He smiled, handed me a quarter and took the picture. See July 2019 post for the unlikely story of how I got the picture back after fifty years of wondering what happened to it.

THE BALLET OF NIAGARA

In Lover’s Leap Legends we devoted 66 of 352 pages to the Maid of the Mist legend. These sob stories of a beautiful Indian maiden (usually pictured nude), sent over Niagara Falls in a canoe as a sacrifice to appease various gods, are not technically Lover’s Leaps but they clearly derive from the same indifference to ethnological truth. In both, a “dusky maiden” dies in the end—usually.

Maid of the Mist narratives were hugely popular and had many spinoffs. Recently, we acquired a 1910-1911 New York Hippodrome souvenir program. On the cover is a flakey adaptation of James Francis Brown’s naked Indian girl in a canoe cresting the falls. Curiously, the theater’s dance version does not result in her death. Twice she is in her canoe headed for destruction but is rescued both times. To sweeten the conclusion even more, the two warring Indian tribes grasp the futility of their conflict and the enemy tribes “bury the hatchet.” Princess Ioneta and the handsome young chief are united in marriage.

With seating for 5,300 (the largest playhouse in the world) the New York Hippodrome opened in 1905 with “A Yankee Circus on Mars,” complete with space ships, elephants, a Spanish clown, a baboon named Coco, and hundreds of singers and dancers.

The Ballet of Niagara was less surrealistic and spectacular. Its rendition of Niagara Falls did draw press praise for its realism and there was a snake dance featuring lovely Indian maidens handling large, presumably fake serpents. The relation of handling snakes to the plot is unknown.

The gigantic theater’s overhead was so enormous it never made a profit and was demolished in 1939.

KNOW YOUR HILLBILLIES

For some reason, we have accumulated an embarrassingly extensive collection of everything hillbilly. For some reason, we put a group of our three-dimensional hillbillies together against a graduated seamless background and photographed them.  This was to advance a book project which is as-yet unpublished. Naturally when more schooled writers than we’uns hold forth on the subject we pay attention.

In an August 15 post, “Playing the Stereotype,” Steve Wiegenstein borrowed an early photo of jazz guitarist Les Paul performing hillbilly music as “Rhubarb Red” from Thomas Peters Facebook post. Dr. Peters is working on a book on the Ozark Jubilee and Springfield’s radio station, KWTO (“Keep Watching the Ozarks”). It “for some reason” reminded Professor Wiegenstein of the crazy Cohen Brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.  Under the photo of Buster on horseback playing a guitar, he wrote of that scene where Buster sings, “Cool Water,” the joke being that that song isn’t a cowboy song, but a 1940s pop hit:

What follows is a series of ghastly/comic episodes that both play on Western-story stereotypes and embrace them, just as the “hillbilly” image both mocks, uses, and embraces that stereotype as well.

We make art where we find it, with the materials at hand. Sometimes those materials include simplified versions of ourselves, and then we must decide whether to challenge the stereotype or play with it. I think either decision can work, as long as the stereotype is approached with conscious intent. It’s when stereotypes are presented unconsciously and uncritically that they harm. The rural rustic, the hayseed, has been with us since Greek comedy, and we will probably never get rid of it. So, we might as well play with that image as we move toward the larger points we are trying to make in our literary and creative work.

It’s encouraging that scholars like Drs. Peters and Wiegenstein are looking into the complexities of the hillbilly trope. It’s gratifying that Wiegenstein believes that “The rural rustic, the hayseed, has been with us since Greek comedy, and we will probably never get rid of it.” Perhaps the time and coin we’ve put into this vast study collection are justified.

“Whether to challenge the stereotype or play with it,” as Wiegenstein so nicely states, is one challenge we faced working on our publishing project. Should we be amused or outraged at these rustic embodiments of ignorance and earthiness? Are white primitives cool or even allowable? We’ll have to check with Rousseau.

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA

Lovers leap worldwide. Across the globe, these romantic dramas climaxed on romantic real estate. Actual geographic locations presumably add veracity to the implausible stories. Our research revealed the global reach of this tale of stalwart and undying love.

Souvenir and postcard of the Lover’s Leap in Guam from Todd Hoose.

Tourist postcards identifying Lover’s Leaps have been produced by the millions and I recently received such a reminder from a friend. Todd Hoose was deployed by FEMA to Saipan following Super Typhoon Yutu. While there, Todd emailed, saying he would be in Guam for a meeting; where was that Lover’s Leap we were putting in the book? I sent him the story:

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA, is a full-service tourist attraction. … The park honors Guam’s Lover’s Leap legend. A 25-foot tall statue of the two tragic lovers by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo was created in 1984. It was destroyed by Typhoon Pongsona in 2002, but retrieved from a junkyard, restored, and reinstalled in 2015.

A plaque on the base tells the story of “The Legend of Puntan dos Amantes.” It’s the familiar Romeo-and-Juliet premise with a Sappho conclusion. An “impressive beauty” is ordered to marry a “powerful, arrogant Spanish captain” by her “wealthy Spanish aristocrat” father. Alas! She loves a “young, gentle, strongly-built and handsome Chamorro man.” They rendezvous on the cliff where they first met:

When the father discovered that his daughter was gone, he told the captain that his daughter had been kidnapped by the Chamorro boy. The father, the captain and all the Spanish soldiers pursued the lovers up to the high cliff above Tumon Bay. The couple stood at the very edge of the cliff. The boy and girl took the long strands of their hair and tied these together into a rope-like knot . . . They looked deeply into each other’s eyes and kissed one last time. In that instant, the young couple leaped off the long, deep cliff into the roaring waves below.

French explorer Louis Claude de Freycinet in 1819 published a slightly different version, which he claimed to have learned from locals. In it both the boy and girl were Chamorro (natives of Guam). She was of higher caste. Without her father’s permission to marry they became impoverished outcasts. They put their love child in a stone vault and climbed to the overlook. Binding their hair together they jumped to their deaths. In later renditions, the baby has disappeared. This unique tying of hair together has persisted and is portrayed in all graphic representations.

Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco is available on our website, at Barnes & Noble, and on amazon.com

Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden – a Pilgrimage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the weekend of Finster Fest, a gathering of folk artists in Dowdy Park in Summerville. I was working in Atlanta at the time, so I headed north that summer day to wander in the fantastical Paradise Garden of Howard Finster. Leland and I have known of his Bible-inspired paintings since the late ‘70s or early ‘80s when we dealt in Americana, folk art, and American Indian goods. Back then self-taught artists like Finster were categorized as ‘outsider’, ‘visionary,’ ‘naïve’ and folk – sometimes all of these, depending on who was writing.

The U.S. Bicentennial spurred interest in all forms of Americana – from colonial furniture to the quilts of Gee’s Bend and the independent visual voices of folks like Finster. We had worked with Dale Eldred and the Kansas City Art Institute to acquire and preserve the works of Jesse Howard. We found Robert E. Smith after seeing his paintings at the Missouri State Fair. Leland found a stack of Edward Patrick Byrne’s paintings of futuristic houses in the back room of a north Missouri antique shop. So my day trip to Summerville Georgia really was a pilgrimage.

In the intervening decades, Finster’s work had been recognized, collected, exhibited and become the subject of academic and museum publications that placed him and likeminded artists in a legitimate cultural context. Catalogued and preserved in museum collections, documented, inventoried and explained as his work is now (the High Museum in Atlanta has a large collection on permanent display), I was curious to see his built environment, Paradise Garden.

Finster’s couple of acres were buzzing with visitors. The small frame house, well decorated by his hand and tastefully expanded by the Paradise Garden Foundation to include a gallery of works, held a small gift shop, a couple of rooms of prints, video room with an interesting documentary playing on a loop. We roamed the garden and buildings freely, wandering from Mirror House (all mirrors inside and out) to Mosaic Garden, past the bicycle tower and Serpent of the Wilderness concrete sculpture. According to the Self Guided Tour booklet, Howard was fascinated by real snakes (“Please stay on the path,” the booklet cautions.) The High Museum has one of his snake sculptures; another was created for an album cover for sort-of-local rock group R.E.M. (from Athens, Georgia). Bits of glass and ceramic are inlaid into meandering concrete sidewalks and rock walls. “I built this park of broken pieces to try to mend a broken world of people who are travelling their last road,” he said in Man of Visions. It is a wondrous place.

It wasn’t always this way. Finster’s 2.5 acres were once a low-lying, swampy place with not much to recommend it. But his vision saw a beautiful garden, with trickling streams and flowering vines and dancing light. A place where angels would appear. And he made it so. He ditched and drained and planted and built. He recycled long before recycling was cool. He organized the leftovers of life and machines – and then made something out of them.

Larry Schlachter, owner of Folk America (www.folkamerica.net), a shop just down the road from Paradise Garden, knew Howard Finster. In his recollection, Howard was not as concerned with maintaining the existing structures as he was with creating more. The Foundation has done a good job of restoring and maintaining the grounds, which had become overgrown and worn. Schlacter handles a number of artists as well as carrying pieces from Finster and family members.

Athens Georgia rock band, R.E.M. graced the cover of Rolling Stone, April 20, 1989, labeled America’s Hippest Band, in an article entitled R.E.M.’s Brave New World by Anthony Decurtis.

Finster did not make the cover himself, but got a five-page color spread inside. “God’s brushman,” David Handelman said, was hip, his art making the album covers for both R.E.M. and David Byrne (Little Creatures).

 

Click on any image to see the full gallery.