It is so quiet in John Oktavec’s upstairs studio that sometimes all he can hear is his own heartbeat. Sometimes he’ll listen to classical music up here when he paints at night; sometimes there’s just the tinkling of a neighbor’s wind chimes to keep him company. This is, mostly, the way he likes it.

"I ain't saying I'm a loner, but I know to be alone when I paint," he says. "It's my escape."

Oktavec, who is in his early 40s, lives by himself in a small white bungalow in Riviera Beach, a few blocks from the Pasadena waterfront. His black easel is set up by a window covered by a curtain—one of the simple ones his mother makes for him, replacing it whenever it gets covered in paint. He is a sign painter by trade—he works for a sign company in Arbutus—and a tinkerer by nature. His house is full of whimsical inventions, such as an off-the-grid LED light contraption that will run off a pendulum, like a grandfather clock. He fixes cars for a little extra money.

But by blood John is a painter of window screens. On the wall next to the easel is a triptych of photographs: John's grandfather, William; his father, Richard; and himself, all at work on painted screens. The scenes they paint are all variations on a theme: vaguely Alpine rural landscapes crowned by a sky of billowing clouds, with a red-roofed cottage in the middle.

Oktavec recites the rules he learned at his father's side. You can't put greens over blacks. The white highlights come last. The brush must be stiff. Oktavec jabs his brush, poking the paint into and around the tiny holes of the wire mesh, so the screen doesn't clog. Sometimes he takes a breath and blows sharply into the screen, clearing a paint-clogged hole, or runs a thumb along a too-defined line, muting the color. "My dad used to say leave it so the birds can fly through the branches—don't make it too solid." he says, daubing a line of green blotches that resolve into a stand of trees. "It's like he's sitting on my shoulder. He pours out of my hands."


The story goes that William Anton Oktavec, Czech-born grocer and aspiring artist, conjured Baltimore screen painting more or less single-handedly in the hot summer of 1913. The elder Oktavec painted a picture of some produce on the screen door of his grocery at the corner of North Collington and Ashland avenues in East Baltimore. A woman next door, noticing how the painted scene made it difficult to see through the screen, asked Oktavec to paint one for her front window to keep men from peering into her living room. He did, copying a greeting-card image of a red-roofed mill. Other neighbors soon clamored for their own painted screens, and by fall Oktavec had sold some two hundred of them. Within a few years, there were thousands of painted screens on the streets of East Baltimore. Most depicted that same iconic subject—a storybook cottage in a sylvan glade.

Elaine Eff, the Maryland Historical Trust folklorist who is the planet's reigning scholarly expert on Baltimore painted screens (her 1984 Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania devotes 412 pages to the topic), estimates that during the art form's pre-war, pre-air-conditioning heyday, the rowhouses of Highlandtown, Canton, Fells Point, and Little Bohemia were decked out in more than 100,000 painted screens. It was not uncommon for every window of every house in a row to be decorated with scenes turned out by a host of itinerant neighborhood artists—most either inspired or directly employed by William Oktavec and his family, who opened an East Monument Street art shop in 1922 that became the epicenter of the trade. Screen painting was seasonal work, offering extra money in the summer months, and dozens of underemployed East Baltimoreans tried their hand at it. The Oktavecs, however, were the masters. "Everyone went to William to learn," Eff says. "The art shop was the shrine, the Mecca, the Oz."

A colorful collection of Oktavecs populate the tale that Eff, a Mount Washington native, has been painstakingly piecing together since her research began in 1974. When William died in 1956, sons Al and Richard picked up his unfinished commissions. The brothers Oktavec introduced variations on the everpresent red-roofed bungalow—they painted local scenes, historical and patriotic images, religious portraits. "My dad and Richie, they really perfected it," says Chris Oktavec, Al's son, who now runs the family's church restoration business in Baltimore.

Richard was the youngest son, and he took to the trade enthusiastically, painting screens in a room above the East Baltimore art shop or in a basement studio at his house in Pasadena. As a child, John remembers prepping screens for his father, painting the sky-blue primer and practicing on clouds, leaning on his dad as he worked. Richard died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1979, when John was 15, and the burden of filling screen orders fell again to Al.

Meanwhile, in the 1980s and '90s, screen painting enjoyed a cultural renaissance of sorts, fueled by Eff's advocacy efforts. She produced a pair of documentary films and, with screen painter Dee Herget, founded the Baltimore Painted Screen Society in 1985 to unite the surviving practitioners of the ebbing East Baltimore folk art and encourage them to pass on their skills via community college classes and festival workshops. Screen painting was celebrated as indigenous city kitsch, akin to Formstone and beehive hairdos.

But John kept his distance from all this. He's never met any of these other screen painters, and he seemed to take his time picking up the brush and fulfilling his family destiny. Indeed, the native community of the art his family invented had become unfamiliar territory: Oktavec says that he hasn't ventured into Baltimore City since 1979, the year his father died. He is prone to panic attacks, he says, and tends to stick close to the Riviera Beach home in which he's lived for the last fifteen years. "I'm not much for crowds," he admits. "I don't think I'd make it in the city."


There's a kind of cosmic irony in the plight of John Oktavec, a screen painter who has become allergic to the city. He is a third-generation practitioner of a distinctly urban artistic tradition, one "created and consumed by a single community," Eff says. And, of course, the screens he creates are themselves tools of privacy, born of the cheek-by-jowl built environment of rowhouse existence, where living room and sidewalk are separated only by inches. People forget that painted screens actually work: A rowhouse fully outfitted is open to light and breezes but visually impenetrable, at least by day. (At night, when the interior of the home is illuminated, the one-way-mirror effect disappears.)

In the days before air conditioning, when windows were cracked wide open from May to September, the bit of eye-fooling camouflage offered by the red bungalow scene was the only buffer against the tumult of the street. "You can see out—they can't see in," read one 1950s painter's pitch line. And looking out the window was a key pastime in East Baltimore. "Painted screens were for that person inside, sitting in the oversize chair by the window," Eff says. "In the pre-TV era, the show's outside."

In her dissertation, she devoted pages of analysis to the complex social statement made by painted screens, which both invite passersby to stare, and rebuff their advances. "The screens are a wonderful veil. They say, someone who cares about home lives here. But you can only look so far."

Screens were also expressions of community solidarity that reflected the era's ethnic homogeneity and seemingly limitless capacity for household decoration, the same forces that fueled the Formstone boom. Once a few homeowners put up painted screens, whole blocks would fall in behind. "The whole point of rowhouse living was you didn't want to stand out," says Eff. "You did as much as you could to conform, not because you had to, but because you wanted to."

This was the East Baltimore of John Oktavec's father. John, who grew up in Pasadena, remembers visiting his father and uncle at the art shop on Monument in the 1970s and can summon forth the city with photographic precision. "I see it like it's yesterday," he says: looking up at the Shot Tower, setting up a screen-painting demonstration with his dad in Fells Point, seeing the lights of the Domino Sugar sign from a family member's bedroom window. He hears menacing stories about the city—the old neighborhood is now full of drug dealers. "I like to keep it in here," he says, tapping his head. "The way it was."

Al's son Chris Oktavec, John's older cousin, says he was surprised when John turned to screen painting a few years back; as a teenager, John was more interested in playing drums or airbrushing flames onto his guitars than painting cottages on window screens. Today, John's personal artistic tastes are not the folk-art norm. He's a massive Star Wars fan, for one: He builds startlingly realistic R2-D2 models, some life-size, and sells them on Craigslist for hundreds of dollars. His favorite artist, he says, is H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist who designed the creatures of the Alien franchise. But little of this makes its way onto the thirty or so screens he paints every year. "I can paint crazy stuff, but I try to stick to the originals," he says.

Business is slow, which is how he likes it: Except for a Craigslist notice he posted a few months back, Oktavec doesn't advertise his services, and he doesn't participate in the public events that the Painted Screen Society organizes. Eff sends a few commissions his way, more than enough to keep him busy. And he gets jobs the same way his father and grandfather did: word of mouth. "Sometimes I think it's dead and forgotten," he says. "But then someone stops me and says, ‘I remember your father.'"

In May, Eff is organizing a weekend of painted-screen events at the Creative Alliance and the American Visionary Art Museum dubbed "Rowhouse Rembrandts." Eff calls it "a celebration of the rowhouse arts"—marble-stoop scrubbing and tire planters and Formstone and stained-glass door transoms. But the key event is a screen painters' reunion party on Friday, May 9, which she sees as an opportunity to take the pulse of the art form. "There are more painters we don't know about," Eff says. "Part of what we're trying to do is find out how many. We're trying to bring them back home."

It would be a coup, of course, to convince the only Oktavec currently active in the trade to stop by. And you can tell that John is thinking about it. He's heard that they've got those full-size rowhouse facades at the museum, with some of his screens mounted in the windows, and he'd like to see that. But he's not making any promises. More likely he'll paint a screen and donate it to the auction. "If I showed up at that thing, they'd all flip," he says. "It'd be anarchy."   

It takes John maybe an hour and a half to paint a screen. His grandfather once did one on a TV show in fifteen minutes, but John takes his time to get the details right. He's faithful to the template that William Oktavec established: the two swans meeting bill-to-bill in the brook, one slightly larger than the other; the red-orange tint to the roof; the foliage that nestles around the corners of the white cottage. "My grandfather always covered up the corners of the house," he says. "It's a feng shui thing."    

The almost pathological persistence of the red bungalow image confounds painted screen historians. In her dissertation, Eff posited that it may be "a remnant of a universal quest for peace and comfort," and even unearthed a photograph of William Oktavec's birthplace in Kasejovice, Czechoslovakia, for proof that the cozy woodland home represents the urban immigrant yearning for the rural idyll of childhood. The house back in Bohemia was indeed a quaint peaked-roof cabin, but the theory, the Oktavecs all said, was bunk: The image was copied from a greeting card, and that was that. 

Still, later in life William Oktavec did trade the clamor of East Baltimore for a bungalow on Bodkin Creek, and here is John, painting that deathless scene in his own little white house by the water. The finished screen looks like it could have been painted fifty years ago.

Sometimes, John says, the people who come by to drop off screens for him marvel at his age.  "They ask me, ‘How do you know about this? You're too young.'" And I say, ‘Well, I know. I know.'"

—David Dudley is Urbanite's editor-in-chief.


For more information about the "Rowhouse Rembrandts" exhibit and events on May 9 and 10, go to www.avam.org.



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