Colorful Apocalypse – Journeys in Outsider Art
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The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so be appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster's famous Paradise Gardens, his journey - of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle - is an unparalleled look at the lives and works of some of Finster's contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and neuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation, Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter's brutal murder.
Along the way, Bottoms weaves a powerful narrative, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.
Greg Bottoms is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of six other works of fiction and nonfiction, including Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, also published by the University of Chicago Press.