Doctor HP Flowers

Rankin Rob Reports:

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Upson County Arabesques and the Trumpet Honeysuckle

     Time was, Doctor Flowers and I would take a run across the Southern countryside at the drop of a hat.  Our runs go back over 20 years, always carving our way through rural county and Forest Service roads in one of his beloved trucks, always a camera and a road log and a bag full of county maps and sugary snacks at hand.  Doctor Flowers has covered the entire Blue Ridge for years, while most of my travels with him have been day trips within easy reconnaissance of the ATL metro.  We've had many adventures, but they are fewer and further between these days, owing mostly to my devotion to family and time sucking professional responsibilities.  I'm a poorer man for those priorities sometimes.
     So I was pretty geeked when it turned out the family was otherwise occupied with musical theatre and I could buy most of a Sunday to get the fuck out of town with Doc.  It had been ages, and the weather was perfect.  We briefly considered a photo walk in Downtown Athens, but a hike at High Falls Park and a subsequent winding roadmap adventure through gutbucket Middle Georgia to an Easter Sunday photo walk in downtown Griffin offered more uncertainty, more likely rural thrills and spills.  And so it was we went south of Atlanta, into the rural counties between the megalopolis and Macon.

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     We tallied three afternoon drive-by Easter Egg hunts in rural Lamar, Upson and Pike Counties.  We discovered dirt roads and sanctified holy rolling churches, tall black men in Easter Sunday ice cream suits and fat white folks (just like me) setting up their holiday barbecues, all in the spirit of our lord and pagan rabbit and egg fertility rights.  More 'Sons of Confederate Veterans' signs than signs either Obama or McCain could muster (Hillary don't even show signage in rural Georgia).  A hot double cheese at the Hardees in Barnesville modulated the harsh effect of Sting shrieking at us over the muzak.  We always end up laughing the hardest at the stupidest things, like rheumy-eyed dogs tugging at a highway flattened-steamed coon carcass or a locally built roadside water park, gone dry and long broke by the recent hundred year drought.

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     Stopped on a red-clay county road in Upson County; Doc grabbing the brakes on the truck and slamming her into reverse, coasting backwards into our own dusty backwash to gawp at a rare patch of Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera Sempervirens) growing along the red clay bank.  I hopped out and dodged the fire ant mounds to find a peaceful spot to download a morning's worth of Diet Mountain Dew while Doctor Flowers entered these relatively rare red wildflowers into this year's wildflower logbook, and mused aloud about the utter poetry of such a Spring moment. From the Blood Root in the pine and rock grotto at High Falls to the windows and doors in Griffin, a day on the road with the good Doctor and his trusty truck and Nikon are filled with wonder, junk food, and the random musings on life and philosophy and rhythm and blues that puts this crazy world into the proper perspective.  God knows it's cheaper than therapy.  A county road map will take you further than Freud any day.  Flower says it, I believe it.

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Rankin Rob
Sunday 23 March 2008

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Lady Di's Color Therapy

     Color therapy… a ballyhooed bromide and avowed remedy for many assorted miseries of mankind including: catarrh, dropsy, dyspepsia, the vapors, jitters and civil disorders, rollin' eyes, fur mouth and hot flashes, the bloat, bloat with hiccups, swollen knuckles, distemper, sciatica, excessive flinching, the grumps, slow foot, amnesia, melancholia, heebie-jeebies, and sometimes swimmin' in the head.
     So, please welcome Lady Di for a home visit. Her backroads photography spans the entire globe from Ireland and France to Morocco and the American southwest (below). Even this wide range cannot contain her extraordinary love of color and sensitive gifts for style and design. Now, open Lady Di's apothecary, with its splashes of therapeutic color, to ignite our passions and fire the cones within every eye. We are rejuvenated.

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Gracias, Lady Di
Published with permission.

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on howard finster by rankin' rob

I first heard about Howard Finster from my one-time dorm-mate Bill Berry, who described Finster's Paradise Garden where his band had filmed their first 'MTV' style video for Radio Free Europe. For some unknown reason Bill decided to wear white boots for that shoot. I need to ask him about that if I ever get the chance.
Around the same time (or a little after), I hooked up with Doctor Flowers. We were neighbors, kindred souls, believers in reggae music and the sheer wonder of driving down an unknown country road for one of the many possibilities there. I got directions to The Paradise Garden from Jefferson Holt ("Jefferson I think we're lost"). "Take Ga 27 north out of Rome and drive up past Summerville to the Pennville community and look for Old Man Kinsey's TV repair shop and take a right. Go down the street and you can't miss it."
We took Doc's new red truck The Beagle up, made a day of it. We followed the directions and found ourselves parked and walking right into the middle of the old buzzard's studio, in a rattletrap crackerbox house on one corner of the garden. The Man of Visions himself ensconced inside, painting one of his Coke Bottles, wooden cutouts in the shape of a coca cola bottle that was his big thing right then. Howard loved coca cola. It gave him strength and the focus to paint his visions through the night, numbering each one. He was happy to have two new strangers walk in for him to witness to about getting right with the Lord.
"Go on out and walk around the garden if you want to. Make all the pictures you want." Flowers was still in the earliest days of his photography and fortunately he took dozens of shots of Howard Finster's Paradise Garden and World Folk Art Church incorporated. The garden took up an entire block of this North Georgia Community. Sidewalk slabs filled with marbles, old metal files. A hundred rusting bicycle hulks welded and sculpted together, everywhere you looked Howard's laborious scrawl warning one and all of the coming rapture. The largest collection of "stuff" I have probably ever seen to this day. An ancient Cadillac permanently parked, scrawls and faces and angels and warnings against drunk driving away from God. And everywhere you look, Howard's angels ascending skyward just like that Talking Heads album cover. My mind reels to this day when I remember the first time we walked through the place. I later found out that Flowers had the same reaction.
We went back probably once a year or so from '85 until the early 90's. I would've gone more often if I had realized that Howard Finster's Garden would be dismantled piece by piece, that the old man's fame would grow and his health would fail and he'd move to a big house in Summerville and leave his garden for his cousins and nephews and the college art school drop out arrivistes. They sold a bunch of the pieces off to the High Museum, and you can go there today and see them, but it's not the same. The last time I drove past, there was a chain-link fence around the place with an entrance listing hours of operation and admission charges. Howard was nowhere to be found, lying instead in a grave outside of the Silver Creek Church some 10 miles away. I'm glad Doctor Flowers documented that place and I hope to see some of those shots as this site unfurls.
Howard was as much of an original as I could ever hope to meet. He was a roving Pentacostal preacher who had never painted anything other than a fence or a tractor when in mid-life the face of God appeared to him in a dollop of tractor enamel on his finger and ordered him to paint His Words and save souls through the art of his visions. God could have just as easily commanded him to take up poisonous serpents. But God was in a whimsical mood that day and we are richer for it.

rankin' rob

Title: © Howard Finster . r0171-14
Series: Howard Finster
Location: Pennville, Georgia
Chattooga County
Date: Saturday 9 May 1987