It was a quiet weekend in Lake Woebegone (to paraphrase a program I stopped listening to years back). The weather was mild for July hereabouts. On Saturday I made a full frontal assault on my renter’s door latch and finally got it working properly. On my uncle Orvis’ advice, I took my Dremel tool to the hole in the striker plate. After some work I discovered that the hole needed to be extended, not sideways, but up. I wore down a grinder head (they made those old striker plates strong back in 1929. Nowadays they’re thin brass. I think this one must have been cast iron), but I prevailed in the end.

Another crisis met and mastered.

On Sunday I actually went to a museum to look at paintings, something I never do.

It came about in this fashion: My friend Chip called me some time back and said he had tickets to this exhibit of Scandinavian landscape paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (the link includes a slide show featuring some of the artworks, in case you’re interested).

I took it for granted he’d gotten the tickets from somebody, didn’t want them, and was trying to give them away. Most anything Scandinavian is fascinating to me (except for their furniture and their politics), but I wasn’t keen to drive around looking for parking in that particular “vibrant, diverse” neighborhood. And anyway, I had no one to use the second ticket. So I told him no.

Then he explained, and I comprehended at length, that he actually wanted to go himself, and was planning to go, and just wanted company. So I agreed.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. The sorrow and pity of the thing was that as the exhibition went on (it was more or less chronologically arranged), the paintings got less interesting to me. I loved the earlier, realistic, Romantic pictures with ships at sail and big storms and bent trees. As the fashion grew more impressionistic and abstract, it all became more and more about the artists and their own states of mind (usually depression). Yes, I’m a Philistine, and I’m proud of it.

Still, it was all interesting. I can look at art with a small trace of comprehension, because I used to draw myself. A lot.

When I was a kid, my life plan was to be some kind of artist. Not a fine artist, but either a commercial artist or a cartoonist. I drew obsessively. Whenever I run into an old classmate, I can count on them asking me, “Are you still drawing?”

My subject matter was a “dead” giveaway. I liked guns. I liked swords. I liked fighting and battles. If were a school kid today, they’d ship me off to a psychologist for counseling (which wouldn’t be a bad thing, come to think of it). My chief subject was the Civil War, until I discovered Vikings. Then I drew Viking battles. Two recurring characters in those old Viking pictures eventually became Erling Skjalgsson (as I think of him) and Lemming, both familiar if you’ve read The Year of the Warrior.

And then, toward the end of high school, I started writing. I think the catalyst for the change may have been my learning to type. I’d always been frustrated with my drawing. What ended up on paper was never exactly what I’d been shooting for, and I always felt I was hammering at the brick wall of my talent limitations. When I started making stories, that frustration vanished, or at least was greatly reduced. I felt I had (or would be able to attain) real mastery of this medium.

So I stopped drawing, pretty much unconsciously. It was some time before I even noticed I’d given it up.

But it’s still enjoyable to look at well-done painting.

There were a couple Edvard Munch’s (the Scream guy’s) works in the collection, but give me J. C. Dahl, for my money.