HOWARD FINSTER:
MOUNTAIN LAKE "WORKOUTS" & PRINTS

 Workshop participants painting Finster's "Dementions".
A room full of Howard Finster's stencils of his sacred "Dementions"
Workshop coordinator and avid participant, Brian Sievking and Howard Finster at the Mountain Lake Horton studio in 1985
   

Howard Finster cutting out a lifesized stencilled design of a self-portarait - one of many such images that he either drew directly or traced from found sources, that he had realized as "sacred art"; Howard preferred to call such stencils of his visionary images"dementions". He felt that once they had been realized in vision it did not matter who traced and painted them - they would alwaysd be "sacred art" (i.e. anyone could be the artist) and he invited people to borrow his and paint their own variations. He also encouraged people to realize their own "sacred art dementions".

The Mt. Lake workshop particiapants painting cut-out "Dementions" on plywood.

Horton studio in 1985 with many of Howard's "Dementions". Workshop participants selected from these and made new ones of their own design.

Artist & printmaker, Brian Sieveking, and Howard Finster at the "Summerville Mt. Lake Workout" at Paradise Garden in 1989. Brian met Howard in 1985 and developed a long term friendship and professional and collaborative relationship to Howard as director of the Mt. Lake Workshop Finster Printmaking Workshop between 1987 and 1994 and continuing as a publisher of some of Howard's most developed prints until Howard's passing in 2001

    

The Rev. Howard Finster's Mountain Lake "Workout", 1985

The first Mt. Lake workshop directed by celebrated Georgia "outsider"/folk artist Reverend Howard Finster was an important introduction to collaborative experience. Many workshop participants cut out and interpretively painted stencilled patterns that they had individually selected from virtually hundreds of Finster's own "visionary" designs. By agreement with Finster and the workshop participants, the finished paintings were combined in specially designed panels and given to the Art Museum of Western Virginia. Known as Howard Finster's "workout", this special collection demonstrates an essential aspect of Finster's artistic and aesthetic belief (i.e. that all images realized by the imagination are "visionary" and that the communicative power of a "visionary" image is inherent and can be conveyed by anyone's artistic effort). This was a particularly edifying way in which to associate the process or means of artistic production with the creative motive of the work. Successive workshops have revealed a pattern of interaction in which creative strategies seem to carry over and develop as a form of expression of the workshop itself.

Howard Finster, Empty Road