Photograph courtesy of Larry Schlachter
“Howard was like a combination of Billy Graham and Mr. Rogers,” muses Larry Schlachter. “With a bit of Bob Vila, the home improvement guy, thrown in.”
Schlachter—tall, 72, serendipitous purveyor of work by some of the country’s most celebrated folk artists—pauses amid the cheerful chaos of Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. He points to a large wooden mold, of the sort used to make cast iron machinery, displayed beneath a defunct trailer covered in Finster’s iconic all-caps handwriting. “I found that for Howard in Shreveport back in the ’80s,” says Schlachter. “Figured he’d find something to do with it, as he usually did.”
Howard Finster—short, bespectacled, seized at age 59 by a message from God that exhorted him to spread the Word through painting—died in 2001, having made, by most counts, over 47,000 works of art. The legendary folk artist lives on through his work, which hangs in museums and galleries all over the world, and Paradise Garden, the sprawling outdoor art park he created on his property in Summerville, Georgia. This September 21 and 22, thousands will flock to Paradise Garden for Finster Fest, an annual celebration of folk art, music, and Howard Finster’s quirky creative zeal.
A few days before the festival, as he does every year, Schlachter will cart his striping machine over to Paradise Garden to draw the lines demarcating artists’ booths—a skill he’s perfected from running Trade Day, a twice-weekly flea market launched by his wife, Jane, in 1976.
Jane Schlachter, who grew up in Summerville, first knew Howard Finster as the man with a cool backyard who fixed the neighborhood kids’ bicycles. She’d never thought of him as an artist until her husband brought her to New York to see Finster feted at an art gallery. “Larry told me, ‘You have to see Howard the way the world sees Howard,’” she says. “And that was like a light switch.”
The couple, who met through the “picker” scene of flea markets and antiquing, became good friends with Finster. Larry Schlachter often dropped by with finds from picking trips, and would buy art from Finster to sell at shows. The Schlachters became dealers in folk art, including work by Lonnie Holley, Michael Banks, and Purvis Young; their gallery, Folk America, is just up the road from Paradise Garden.
After Finster died, the Schlachters, along with other friends and neighbors, banded together to turn Paradise Garden into a nonprofit arts center open to the public. Larry serves on the board, and the Schlachters donate work to annual fundraiser auctions.
Collectors and museum buyers often reach out to Larry for help authenticating Finster pieces. “I’d know his handwriting anywhere,” Larry says. Though Howard Finster was exhaustingly prolific, painting on anything he could get his hands on, the value of his art climbed after his death: A Finster original is now worth many thousands of dollars.
Some art at Folk America, however, is not for sale. Larry Schlachter gently presents a painting in the shape of a shoe, the first of several Finster made in the 1990s. “To Larry from Howard,” the text reads in Finster’s iconic all-caps handwriting. “Thanks for helping me in the Lord’s work.”
This article appears in our September 2024 issue.
