"Go to the Ant, You Sluggard" – Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

The Reverend Howard Finster was perhaps the most famous American religious artist of his time. He was born in Valley Head, Alabama in 1916 and died in Georgia in 2001. Because Finster realized that his congregation did not remember his sermons even minutes after he had finished, he published religious songs and poetry in local newspapers in the 1930s and hosted a radio prayer show in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He claims God charged him to illustrate his religious visions in 1976 when "A warm feeling came over me to paint sacred art."

The official name of this painting – done in oils on wood paneling – is "God is Love. Seek his will and find his peace he saves from sin."

Finster began building his everchanging environmental sculpture, Paradise Garden, on swampy land behind his house in the early 1960s. Composed of walkways and constructions made from cast-off pieces of technology, the Garden assembles individual monuments to human inventors into an all-encompassing "Memorial to God." Much of the building material in the garden was accumulated from Finster’s television and bicycle repair businesses and his twenty-one other trades.