Art School

April Steinmetz's day at Shawnee High School in Medford begins at 7:45 a.m. with a 40-minute gym class and doesn't end until the end of her eighth-period art class at 1:50 p.m. In between, the sophomore squeezes in honors geometry, biology, U.S. history, girls' singing ensemble, English and another art period. What she doesn't squeeze in is a lunch period. "I had to go through a lot of appointments with the guidance office to give up my lunch period so I could take both the ensemble and the art classes," said Steinmetz, 15, who likes to sing but would like to major in art in college.

Forget eye or hair color, build or birthmarks. Creativity is what runs in the Letven family. At least, that's what co-workers of Ed Letven would have you believe. Their boss, chairman of Horsham-based Letven/Diccicco Inc., celebrated his 60th birthday last week, and this month he celebrates his 25th year in the advertising-agency business. According to the firm's account supervisor for public relations, "creative is the first thing that comes to mind. " "Everything that he does has a touch of creativity to it," said Karen Cutler.

Nineteenth-century French art students called it pater les bourgeois - shocking the respectables, deliberately dismaying the powers-that-be through one's art. But when the respectables are Chicago aldermen, shock and dismay are only the beginning. These guys don't just get mad, they get even, as Chicago's School of the Art Institute has learned. Nineteen angry members of the City Council marched into the prestigious art school Wednesday afternoon, accompanied by police, and seized a painting by a graduating student that portrayed the late Mayor Harold Washington clad in a bra, panties and garter belt.

For anyone who remembers the teenage years as an idyllic chapter of wild fun, carefree adventure and experimentation without consequences, Susan Skoog's Whatever is not the film for you. The New Jersey heroine of this clear-eyed, understated first feature is a high school senior who dabbles in drugs and drink, endures the taunts of her younger brother and watches her best friend go through a gauntlet of reckless sexual escapades. Meanwhile, Anna Stockard (Liza Weil) is still worrying about losing her virginity and getting into art school.

Long before Philip Jamison became a watercolorist, a collector, a teacher and self-styled philosopher, he had considered a career in business. This was in the 1950s, the era of the gray flannel suit. Jamison had served in the Navy during World War II and was awaiting entrance into the Wharton School when a friend suggested he try art school. Despite encouragement from a high school art teacher, Jamison, a lifelong resident of West Chester, did not see a future in art. "It never occurred to me that I could make a living.

Some people can be truly accommodating. Farmers leave their bales out in the fields a little longer than usual. They might take a different route at harvest time, leaving the lower pasture for last, if need be. Such help is not unusual: People often go out of their way for landscape painter Jon Redmond, whose solo exhibit was to open Friday at the Somerville- Manning Gallery in Greenville, Del. Redmond, 27, is among a diminishing group...

On a day of a thousand reviews, it was a moment of high praise. Tyler School of Art professor Jon Clark turned back the cover of a sketchbook, his eyes widening to absorb the abstract human forms sketched in blue and black on the page below. "This," he said, "is different. " Ten minutes and a dozen illustrations later, Clark had good news for the source of the work, Jonathan Eckel, 17, an Abington Senior High School student who watched the process with headphones around his neck.

Albert Gans strides into the room wearing a neat gray beard, a resolute expression, and a smock that could pass for Peter Falk's raincoat. He has come to work on his masterpiece, and he gazes at the plaster wall in the Coatesville Senior Center as Michelangelo might have surveyed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Intently. Reverently. A wiry, vigorous 70-year-old artist and teacher, Gans intends to compress 300 years of history into 30 feet of wall at the Senior Center. On the floor near his ladder is a half-scale drawing containing the major features of the mural, beginning with French explorer Pierre Bizallion trading for furs with the native people of what is now Coatesville around 1700.

The Talking Heads, easily the most influential band of the late '70s and early '80s, stripped rock down to its atomic weight. Minimalists with maximum impact, this quartet of art-school refugees abandoned the Rhode Island School of Design to make music that was spare, imagistic, indelible. Thus it makes sense that the best Talking Heads album is audiovisual: Jonathan Demme's rapturous 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, which has been digitally remastered to take advantage of the improved technology in film sound and is being re-released.

For 17 years, Libbie Soffer plied the trade of dental hygienist while dreaming of herself as an artist. In her mind, she illustrated the stories her patients told as she cleaned their teeth - in red for anger, dark gray for sadness. At home she made jewelry from beads and fabric pieces and dreamed of art school. Then, at age 38, she walked away from dentistry and enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art. Twenty years later, the Wallingford resident is preparing for her ninth one-person exhibition, "Shirtales," which will be at Philadelphia's Nexus Gallery from Friday through Nov. 28. "I can trace making sculptures back to childhood, when I was continuously creating things," said Soffer, 58, who operates from a studio in Aston.