From the Brush of Torkel Gundel
MY WIFE SAYS THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN us, this second-rate landscape painting. Not the fact that it caught my eye — we’d both noticed it at the Humboldt Park sidewalk sale, hanging catawampus from a chainlink fence — but that I would give it a second look, that it would steal my attention for weeks to come, that I would obsess over it. Dated 1958, the painting featured a blue stream rippling through an empty farmstead, with a windmill on the horizon. A red-roofed barn. A smoky stand of aspen.
It was more Goodwill than Monet, but it wasn’t the childlike artistry that sparked my imagination. In the lower right-hand corner, the painter had signed his name in cartoonish capital letters: Torkel Gundel. I savored the syllables like hard candy. I pictured some kind of Shrek,
