Screen savers

Thirty years ago Dee Herget quit her job as a telephone operator in City Hall: She was losing her hearing. She decided to try painting. Though she had no training in art, it seemed easy, so she bought paint and brushes and did her first scene – on a window screen.

With that, she had taken her first step into an art, or craft, peculiar to this old city on the Chesapeake Bay.

"When I look at it now I can't believe I painted something so terrible," she recalls.

Undeterred, she took to her basement. Six weeks later she emerged confident enough to put this ad in the newspaper: "Painted screens are not dead. They are alive and living in Highlandtown."

"I got one call," she says. "It came in July 1977. I placed the ad in April."

It wasn't encouraging. "She only wanted me to touch up a painted screen she already owned, an Oktavec. When I saw it I thought, I could never do this."

Today, Ms. Herget is renowned in the little-known universe of screen painting. She receives requests for her window screens from Australia, France, Hawaii, and, of course, her neighbors. During my visit to her bayside house, a woman arrived with a screen for Herget to paint. "I want the blue heron," she said, indicating a picture on Herget's porch, which serves as her gallery.

Herget is one of only two "master screen painters" among the hundred or so practitioners of the craft. The man whose work so intimidated her, William Oktavec, died in 1956. He's revered as the originator of this peculiar folkloric expression that is so profoundly of and about Baltimore.

A Czech immigrant who reached Baltimore in 1909, Mr. Oktavec opened a grocery store. He found that the summer sun dried out the fruits and vegetables he displayed. To diminish its effect, he painted images of apples, melons, cabbage, etc., on the screen covering his inventory. People were charmed. Oktavec realized he had something: He painted a screen with a picture of a red-roofed bungalow and two swans in a pond, and sold it. He painted more, sold more, then opened an art shop that his sons inherited, along with their father's skill at screen painting.

To this day, the red-roofed cottage, or variations of it – with mountains, waterfalls, "anything bucolic," as Herget puts it – remains the guiding image for most screen painters, though some try other themes such as ships or portraits.

There's a reason for this, though one which may be losing its imperative as Baltimore changes. Through much of the 20th century the red-roofed cottage – which Oktavec got from a greeting card – was said to represent a dream cherished within Baltimore's blue-collar neighborhoods, especially those on the east side of the city.

"These pictures, these screens, seemed just right in East Baltimore," muses Peter Hilsee, of the American Visionary Arts Museum, which seeks the quirky art of the untrained genius. The museum is showing works by 11 screen painters, displayed in the windows and doors of Baltimore row houses, with marble steps, faux stone and brick facades, reconstructed inside the museum.

"Perhaps these screens depicted a way of life they couldn't have," Mr. Hilsee says – "they" being those who painted them and those who bought them for as little as a half dollar.

It was working man's art. "These painters roamed the neighborhoods during the Depression years," says Elaine Eff, Maryland's state folklorist. "In the '40s and '50s there were probably 100,000 painted screens throughout row house Baltimore."

Ms. Eff came as a catalyst to Baltimore's folk culture. Though born in botanically lush environs far from the brick and concrete precincts that came to fascinate her, she brought academic expertise and deep sympathy for things folkloric, especially screen painting. In 1985 she assembled the Painted Screen Society of Baltimore to call attention to the craft that, in the words of one academic, was "born and grew here from whole cloth, invented, as it were, by one resourceful resident."

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