GUEST: I bought it in Washington, D.C., in 1985. There was a gallery near where I lived, and I just, I loved it. I couldn't afford it with the money that I had in the bank. I was a cook. And, um, so I talk to her about it and she says, "Well, I can sell it to you on installment." So I was, like, "Okay."
APPRAISER: And, and how much was it?
GUEST: I paid $1,100 for it.
APPRAISER: In 1985, which was a lot of money.
GUEST: A lot of money.
APPRAISER: Yeah. Yeah.
GUEST: For me. The thing is, he also did the cover of Talking Heads album called "Little Creatures." And I paid my first payment, and then the next week, that album came out. And I was, like...
APPRAISER: And, and who are we talking about here?
GUEST: Howard Finster.
APPRAISER: Howard Finster, okay.
GUEST: That's right.
APPRAISER: Finster was a, a visionary artist. Uh, and he was out there. And you can look at this and say, "Wow!"
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: He was born in 1916.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And, uh, he was one of 13 children. And he, he declared that he had his first vision when he was three years old.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: His sister, who was deceased, visited him in a dream and said, "You, Howard, you will be a man of visions." He became an evangelical preacher.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: But he was all along making art. He finally moved to near Summerville, Georgia...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:...and started the Paradise Garden. And the Paradise Garden still exists today.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Uh, that you can go see. It's a, it's a, full of oddball buildings that incorporate Finster's art. R.E.M. and the Talking Heads discovered him and there was an article about him in "Atlanta" magazine.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And people started picking up on this weird, quirky guy. So let's sort of delve into this.
GUEST: (laughing) Okay.
APPRAISER: And the first thing, it's made out of boards.
GUEST: Oh, yeah.
APPRAISER: There's some mirror. This is a piece of plexiglass.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And he's painted everywhere. He's covered every...
GUEST: Everywhere.
APPRAISER: ...complete surface, which is typical of the work that he did. Lots of verbiage, lots of action. And then you sort of delve into this, and you say, "Okay, here's the Tree of Life," and there are clouds in ascending from the Tree of Life.
GUEST: Happy clouds.
APPRAISER: Happy clouds. And then, of course, scattered throughout are keys to Finster's work.
GUEST: So instead of just writing the number 3,524, he wrote the "3,000 and 524 works of art."
APPRAISER: Yeah, and, and of course, Finster had received another vision that he was to make 5,000 works of art. And that's why he started numbering them. And he continued to work until he died in 2001.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: So there, there... No one knows absolutely how many works of art Finster did. But it's probably in excess of 45,000 or 50,000 works of art.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Which brings us around to value of this remarkable thing.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: What do you think it's worth today?
GUEST: Not that long ago, a gallery owner in Atlanta told me it's worth maybe $3,000 to $5,000 at auction.
APPRAISER: Yeah. Okay.
GUEST: That's all I knew then.
APPRAISER: I, I, I would differ a little bit. Most of his work, his small-dimensional work, is either measured in the few hundreds...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:...to $1,500, $2,000. In the right outsider art auction, I think this would probably bring between $15,000 and $25,000.
GUEST: Really?! That's great!
APPRAISER: Absolutely. Absolutely.
GUEST: Great. Good for Howard. I knew it was very special when I saw it.
