Screen savers

Baltimore painters keep the urban folk art of window screen scenes alive.

By Richard O'Mara | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 14, 2007 edition

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Baltimore - 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.

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