by Dennis Dalman
People who visit Bud Netka at Fisher’s Garden Mobile Park in Sauk Rapids do double-takes – lots of double takes.
They see and think things like this:
“What an odd place to put a security safe – right in the kitchen. Hey, whoa!, that’s not a safe; it’s a freezer unit painted to look like a safe.”
“Look at that tree stump that someone made into a flower planter. Wait a minute, that’s not a stump. It’s a concrete planter painted to look like a tree stump.”
“Get a load of that old-fashioned covered wooden bridge across the road there. Oops! That’s not a bridge. It’s a building painted to look like a bridge.”
Netka is a master of what French painters dub trompe l’oeil, which means, in French, “trick the eye.” It’s a manner of painting in which the painted image mimics another object in such a way that viewers think for a split second or two (sometimes longer) that they are seeing what is really not there.
The painted black security safe in Netka’s kitchen, for example, is a regular freezer unit he painted black to look like an old-fashioned safe rescued from some old bank. It’s meant as a visual pun; food locked up; a dieter’s reminder.
The “tree stump” is one of six concrete flower planters in the mobile-home park that Netka painted to resemble actual tree stumps with their textured bark surfaces.
And the covered wooden bridge is Netka’s latest tour de force, recently completed, that has plenty of heads turning.
Netka likes to tell people, with a sly smile, that it’s the only old-fashioned covered wooden bridge in Minnesota.
It’s a bit of a long story how the bridge came to be. The “bridge” is about 60 feet across the road to the southeast of Netka’s wooden deck on his mobile home. Many a time, while daydreaming on his deck, he would look across and see a white pump house. One day it occurred to him he’d like to paint it – something whimsical, something fun. And then the idea of a covered bridge occurred to him, the kind of bridge often seen in New England calendar scenes, the kind that horses pulling a carriage would clop across.
Netka asked mobile-home park management and received permission for his project. Then, like an artist-mathematician, he began doing sketches and carefully measuring vantage points.
First he painted the building a dark brown, as most covered bridges are. Then on the pump house’s west side, facing his deck, he painted a scene to make it look like a viewer sitting on Netka’s deck could see, at an angle, through the “bridge” to its other side, with the park trees and playground equipment visible. The viewers can also “see” the inside of the bridge’s south wall, with its two windows showing bits of scenery (trees, a fence) outside. Of course, in reality, the views are nothing more than painted illusions, all on the west side of the building.
On the east side of the building, Netka painted a scene as if one is about to enter the covered bridge, westbound, toward his yard. One can see a boy and girl standing in the street and behind them lots of trees, part of Netka’s garage and the little wooden lighthouse that stands in his yard. Through the two “windows” to the right one can see part of Netka’s deck and part of his house.
If viewers stand to the south of the building, the two “windows” show the view of a neighbor’s house to the north. On the north side of the shed, the two windows show a view of a neighbor’s house and yard to the south. What’s interesting is that a viewer must stand at only certain angles for the illusions to “work,” otherwise the images all seem off-kilter, out of line, shuffled and wrong.
There are, in fact, no actual windows in the building. The pump house has no openings, only one door on its east side. All of the rest is painted illusions – bridge, windows, trees, skies, glimpses of houses, yards, playground equipment. All illusions. French artists would nod approval.
“Ah, oui, c’est trompe l’oeil,” they’d say, after bumping into a wall.
Netka can only hope that on some dusky night, an inebriated wanderer doesn’t try to walk across the wooden bridge, only to be knocked down cold by a rude wooden wall.
Raised in Minneapolis, Netka has lived for about 10 years in Fischer’s, on property that used to be the site of the Russell Trading Post in 1849, as a small historical marker in the park testifies.
His home in the park is at the very edge of a steep bank overlooking the Mississippi River. Beyond the sliding glass doors on the west side of the house is a deck from which steps lead all the way down, in steep incline, to a dock at the edge of the river.
The inside of his house resembles a museum as much as a home. There are two art-studio rooms and paintings everywhere to be seen. His bathroom is another trompe l’oeil achievement; a painted mountain scene covers every wall, as if its walls are made of glass and overlooking a Colorado scene. The “open-air” room can give a visitor a few nervous split seconds of dubious privacy.
Not all of the art works in Netka’s home are examples of trompe l’oeil, however. Most are painted canvases of landscapes and lakescapes, often with animals in them, inspired mostly by places in Minnesota. Netka also likes to paint photos of old farmsteads and old houses, some of them ramshackle, tilted and sagging with age, tempered by time.
Netka, now 61, was a budding artist at the age of 2 when he loved to dash off cartoon doodles. He knew he had a knack for it and kept drawing and painting. He can – and will – paint virtually anything. He likes a challenge. And as his trompe l’oeil work proves, he often considers art a whimsical, fun thing to do. The people at Fischer’s also enjoy the work, as do visitors. Many of them have learned to be a bit skeptical of what they see in the park. Is it real? Better look again. Wait a minute now, that’s a painting! It’s a Netka!