Howard Finster squinted, readjusting his glasses.

The show was entitled "The Second Noah: A Man Of Vision" at a gallery on the Grand Strand where local art and architecture is a perfect backdrop for the quirky reverend.

At a price tag of $8,000, you can walk home with one Finster piece. You can browse the painted soda can, a dented painted paint can and other oddities. At Broadway at the Beach, a huge parking complex with the largest parking lot in South Carolina, there is a kite shop with an entrance adorned with a small plastic man, bending over, pants down with bubbles bubbling out of his rectum. Perfect Finster territory.

“I never seen a person I didn’t love,” Finster said in our interview as art lovers walked by.

I bought a Finster self-portrait at the show, and for $90 I was satisfied with the two pieces of wood, a shelf piece with his scribbling on the white base and non-descript religious ramblings jotted down on the unfinished wood backing in black magic marker. Since I bought that piece, my family has given me down the road about what a waste of money it was. All the laughter. All the ribbing. Now I have the final last laugh. Howard Finster is dead. And now my investment of $90 looks like it has maybe tripled. Hold on. Wait right there. Now I am not happy Howard passed on. I was initially shocked and then saddened. A lot of people I have interviewed have passed away, and it just tells me how much older I am getting. Most people I’ve interviewed are not well-known, like the county council member, a smoker who died of lung cancer; like the fire chief whose department’s spotted canine mascot always barked at me, snarling; like the deceased guy who won South Carolina’s highest honor, the Order of the Palmetto, who tried to tell me a joke once with the “n word” in it.

Howard was well-known, at least in the art world and in the South. At House of Blues in North Myrtle Beach, S.C. there hangs some of his paintings, a venue that got mad when I wrote some articles interviewing about 235 Christians and 65 preachers about an “artist” who allegedly ripped down his leather pants on stage, was bending over and spread his cheeks to the audience. He was a reverend, but unlike the Rev. Howard Finster who saved souls in the 1940s, Marilyn Manson brought a different evangelization to House of Blues.

“I have visions about very sophisticated things,” Howard told me. His thick white hair looked soft enough to touch. His syrupy Southern accent had no trademark and is mimicked across our Palmetto state in the rural hinterlands of Ketchuptown here in Horry County.

With gold-rimmed glasses, a striped dark blue jacket and khakis stained with white paint on the left pants leg, Finster is wearing white athletic socks, black shoes and a starched white dress shirt. It is June 29 and getting hot outside.

The Chief of Police then, Sam Killman, and his wife, are walking through the gallery. So is a woman with a Talking Heads album cover and a Columbia accountant.

“I’m sort of wrapped up in that Olympic thing,” he says. “I’ve done two or three Olympic pieces. The Coca-Cola Company and some of the members of that thing are trying to get my work in there.”

The company commissioned him to paint an Olympic Coke bottle, eight feet high, to represent American art. When they contacted him, he was afraid they were about to engage him in legal difficulties. That year the Howard Finster Festival was held in a school yard in Summerville, Ga.

“I’ve got elevated blood sugar, and I’m deteriorating. My poor old wife, she’s breaking at the same time I am. I’ll be 80 years old, and I’m trying to reach all the people I can.”

The gallery owner had visited Finster and set up the show.

“I couldn’t hardly believe it,” Finster says. “I’ve heard about Myrtle Beach all my life. They gave me one of the finest hotels I’ve ever stayed in. I’m right on the beach over here looking over a water-cooled roof and a 200-foot swimming pool right under my back porch, and I’m sitting there all day long seeing them kids and their mothers playing in the water. Right down in the basement there’s a bunch of other swimming pools like a museum.

“But the people here at art shows in this town, they don’t understand about preaching in a show. They’re used to being in churches, so I kind of try to have services wherever I have a show.”

A color TV is on in the corner of the room with Johnny Carson on.

Michael Stipe had been at a recent birthday party for Finster, who told me Stipe looked “sick.”

When Howard talked about Jesus Christ, God and heaven, you wondered if it was all a show or if the art was a show. Warhol caught hell for his commercialization, but the message there was a nihilistic emptiness devoid of original thought. No message. You see Howard’s religious messages throughout the room, and you listen to him, and he is flapping his jaws about church while a lot of artists are concerned about money, drugs and fame.

To listen to Howard, he sometimes wandered through his subject and became unfocused, although you wonder whether or not he is possessed, a spiritual puppet, not like a televangelist. His words are from Revelations, and the fire and brimstone underlying theme is there, a scary thought founded in fear, but coming from a man who does not pound his fist or threaten you with immediate damnation, he comes off as a meek minister of colors.

“We fought and have spilled boxcar loads of blood for all of the churches to exist and to be free. I think it’s wrong to condemn any church. That’s what you call freedom. I seen that Russian ruler up on the stand wiggling all over and trying to be rock and roll. He’s trying to get his people on democracy. It tickled me when I saw him doing that. He’s really interested in those people having democracy and freedom.”

He holds one of his art pieces, an animal.

“This goat here, he can be used in a lot of different subjects. He can be used as a scapegoat. You know, goats are mean. They butt you. I got butted by one. My sister got butted by one. Sheep are humble. They represent Christians.”

Before this appearance, the last time he made one was the previous year in Oxford, Miss. at the International Conference on Elvis Presley.

“In the first church I pastored I began to learn that there are three worlds for me to work in. One is a teen-ager’s world, and one is a child’s world, and one is the old people. I have a right smart time working with old people. They don’t seem to want to do things in the church like they ought to. The young people are a little difficult, too. The kids are really my favorites.”

On Paradise Garden in Georgia: “While I was building it, people called me a kind of junk man. A lot of people come to my garden.” R.E.M.’s first video was shot there.

“Elvis appeared to me in my garden several years ago after he died. He walked up behind me, and I looked around and seen him and said a very short word to him, and he said a very short word to me.”

His

Have you ever had a vision? Most of them compare them to dreams. Nightmares become scary not when you first have them that first night, but when they manifest themselves in the daylight when you are awake.

His first vision was when he was three in Alabama his sister, Abby was walking down from the clouds with steps. When the age you and I first legally got behind the wheel of an automobile with a card the state issued you, he started to preach, and there were 13 children in his family. Ever been to a tent revival? Forget Elmer Gantry. Forget PTL and Jim Bakker curled up like a fetus on the floor, weeping like a widow. Finster pastored several churches. He and his wife, Pauline, had five kids. Ever considered having a blood transfusion from an ape? You might have more in common with a Witness than you think.

A few days later after the opening, I drove from Conway to an old warehouse-studio in downtown Myrtle Beach and listened to Finster preach before and after a slide show. The smell of freshly popped popcorn floated through the humid, musty air as the gallery owner sucked down a Coke.

Finster and his family had eaten at a local steakhouse called “Howard’s.”

There was a Baptist preacher who led a song as everyone joined in. Myrtle Beach Mayor Bob Grissom, who died a few years later after he lost an election, used to always tell funny, sometimes irreverent jokes to me at events and was a joy to be around. He is late for another engagement, but he gives Howard a key to the city.

“I’m the only member of the Presbyterian Church that’s paid not to sing in the choir,” Grissom said. “They don’t even want me to make a joyful noise. It’s a pleasure to here with you and to know that the cultural arts community and our community has progressed to the point where a religious motif is very strong. Myrtle Beach has come a long way in the last few years, and we’ve got a long way to go. The Lord has blessed us very, very much, and I think he will continue to. This key, Brother Finster, does not unlock anything except the love in our hearts and our respect for you and what you have done for your fellow man.”

As I remember that hot Sunday afternoon in this post-Twin Towers environment and the end of time scenario vividly replaying in our nuclear world, I recall Finster’s words from our interview as my tape recorder whirred.

“I appreciate the mayor,” Finster said at the warehouse. “He gave me this key. That’s exactly what my mayor done down at the house. I don’t know of anyone else in the world who has given me a key. I don't know what that key will unlock. I know it's done unlocked my heart, and I thank the mayor for the key because surely it unlocks something.

“Everything is so beautiful here. Ya’ll have a lot to be proud of. You don’t have to be called to do art. If you want to be an artist, you can be one. What you're going to do in this life is going to be you. You don’t wait around to see if you're gifted to do art. If you love art and want to do art, get started on it.”

Jay Brown’s film through the American Museum of Folk Art, “The Sacred Vision of Howard Finster,” is shown.

“I have visions that I cannot describe,” Finster says in the film. “I have visions that I can’t paint, and I see things that I don’t think anybody can paint, but I try to do an image of it the best that I can. I definitely had a call from God to preach the gospel.”

It all started when Finster and his brother were hauling wood on a wagon with mules, and his brother made him laugh.

He and his brother were hauling wood with mules on a wagon, and his brother got him laughing.

“I was about 13 years old. All at once I felt God call me to preach there,” he said. “I just said, ‘God, I can’t do that. I can’t preach.’ And he didn’t turn me aloose.” Finster said that his parents figured he was “mental.“

He was working on a bicycle in 1976 and had paint on his finger, and there was a face in the paint that spoke to him.

“Not in sound. It spoke to me conscientiously. Paint sacred art. I looked at that thing, and it was looking at me, telling me to paint sacred art, and I said, not me. I’ve seen professionals do it.” Then Howard began his slide show.

Teen-agers in the audience are resting their tennis shoes on the church pews in the studio at this point while the artist gives a lecture, fishing for souls.

“All you've got to do is believe in Jesus Christ. He’s been by my side. I’ve got 15 grandchildren. I’ve about run my race. I’ve had alters full. You’re the only one who’s going to know it if you get saved. How many of you know ‘When The Roll Is Called?’”

Singing with his eyes closed, there is an exotic bird pecking at his ear as he strokes it as his feathered friend is singing along like there were 7 days in a minute, 365 days in a second.

I’m not happy Howard is dead. I grieve his loss, and I am still in mourning. I still love my art piece, but I’m going to try to sell it because we are in a recession. Art celebrates life. I hope nobody buys it. It feels great to have a real work of art in the house instead of cheap posters, fake ocean scenes slapped together by self-loathing local beach artists and those sick Charleston prints. After I bought Howard’s work, I started painting a little myself and began to put my photographs in frames to use around the house. “YOU SPENT HOW MUCH?!!!” The freelance magazine check I spent on that piece has tripled in value now, but I’m talking myself into keeping it and just focusing on the Rev. Franklin Graham’s idiotic call for use of nuclear force on TV after the NYC memorial service. When Howard yelled “FIRE!” in our crowded theatre of life, there was never any question as to whether or not there were actual flames or a boy crying wolf.