Talking Heads - 'Little Creatures'
The Reverend Howard Finster.
Smiling angels swoop across the cerulean sky, trees and mountains rise amidst "twenty-six wholesome verses", and David Byrne carries the world on his shoulders like a post-modern Atlas. The painting was the cover of the Talking Heads’ album Little Creatures, Rolling Stone’s album cover of the year in 1985 and the pop world’s introduction to an eccentric preacher/artist named Howard Finster.
"I think there's twenty-six religious verses on that first cover I done for them. They sold a million records in the first two and a half months after it come out, so that's twenty-six million verses I got out into the world in two and a half months! That's more than I ever reached in the forty-five years I was pastoring. The rock-and-rollers are my missionaries."
Finster also collaborated on a painting for the cover of R.E.M.'s second album Reckoning.
Finster (and his art) also appears in the band's video for "Shiny Happy People" as the man riding the bike that's moving the background of artwork.