Oil Paintings

Modesty is as rare as it is hard to define. Yet it is just this quality that seems best to sum up the work of Edie Wells Bristol at Bianco Gallery. Even her subject matter is on a modest scale. To say she finds her principal inspiration in still life and room interiors might be as misleading as it is true, for her oil paintings are mainly concerned with grace and texture. This Chestnut Hill native, who now lives in Carversville, can find in her surroundings a sufficient multitude of intricate shapes, planes and forms existing in motionless, gravity-less space to satisfy everything she tries to understand and observe.

Lanard Crane has never been happier. He is a big, broad, barrel-chested, tattooed ex-cop who likes nothing better than prowling his boiler room with a heavy wrench in his hairy fist. Unless it's sitting in his studio with a slender paintbrush in his hand. Crane, who feels about ships and boilers the way some people feel about poetry, is the chief engineer at Holy Family College in Torresdale. He also is an artist who has sold more than 50 of his oil paintings in the last few years and a student working toward a bachelor's degree in history.

MANY GALLERIES stay open later on the first Friday of the month. Some schedule special events for second Fridays. Here's what's happening tonight and this month at art spaces around the region. Artists' House Gallery. 57 N. 2nd St., 215-923-8440, artistshouse.com . Oil paintings and pastels by various artists. Through April 29. Reception 5-8:30 p.m. Friday. Bridgette Mayer Gallery. 709 Walnut St., 215-413-8893, www.bridgettemayergallery.com . "German Gómez: Diary Portraits.

Visitors exit the Cezanne exhibit yesterday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The day's showings of the popular French impressionist's oil paintings, watercolors and drawings sold out. The exhibit is scheduled to be in Philadelphia until Sept. 1.

Angelo R. Pinto, 85, an artist and photographer who taught art appreciation at the Barnes Foundation for 57 years, died Friday at his home in New York City. Mr. Pinto was a protege of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who bought five of Mr. Pinto's reverse paintings on glass for the museum in Merion. He joined the Barnes staff in 1935 and taught there until 1992, when he retired. "He raised generations of artists and collectors (at Barnes), and introduced Dr. Barnes' concepts and the world of his paintings to generations of Philadelphians," said his daughter, Jody Pinto, also an artist.

A potpourri of watercolors, pastels, oil paintings, metal sculpture, raku, handmade jewelry and photography makes up much of an exhibition by community artists sponsored by Pennsylvania State University's Ogontz Campus. The work of faculty members also is displayed in the exhibit, which continues through Oct. 25. There are about 50 pieces in the show, which was coordinated by Sally Reinitz, assistant to Ogontz's director of university relations, and faculty member and resident artist David Milby.

With one ear turned toward his interpreter, Michel Delacroix prepared to meet the dozens of fans who lined up in the Fine Arts Gallery in Ardmore waiting for him to autograph a copy of his new book. Delacroix, a 54-year-old French artist whose lively paintings of Parisian street scenes have gained him international fame, visited the gallery April 30 to open a retrospective exhibit of his work. Delacroix's appearance at the gallery, the only Philadelphia-area stop on his 16-city tour of the United States, drew more than 600 people to the opening of the exhibit, which will continue through May 17. Within half an hour of the opening, three of the artist's oil paintings - the only three the gallery was able to obtain - had been sold, for about $25,000 each.

The vivid green cows standing in a field of red under an orange sky should have been turning heads yesterday in Rittenhouse Square. So, too, should have the colorful pink pigs strolling near the red farmhouse below a cobalt blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. But those two framed oil paintings, along with five others - all the work of Ruthe McCann, an accomplished Philadelphia painter - never made their Saturday appearance at the annual Rittenhouse Square Fine Arts exhibition.

Grace Hartigan hung out with the big boys of abstract expressionism: Pollock, de Kooning, Kline. But she never toed the party line of ?ber-critic Clement Greenberg; even back in the '50s, Hartigan let her juicy color and looping, muscular lines encompass - horrors! - recognizable, even familiar everyday objects. A small but flavorful slice of her work from recent years is now at the Seraphin Gallery. Called "Aspects of the East," the eight paintings show an artist loosely riffing on various "orientalist" inspirations with knowing, lightly worn art-historical echoes from the odalisques of Matisse to the harems of Ingres.

If "Scripted" strikes you as an unusually cutting-edge exhibition for Gross McCleaf Gallery, no need to worry that this familiar outpost of contemporary realist painting is changing its focus. It's summer and the gallery's director, Sharon Ewing, decided to let her assistant director, Todd Keyser, a painter who just received his master's in fine art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, stir things up. Keyser has not disappointed. "Scripted" is a remarkable show of 10 artists whose works make ample use of the "arbitrary signifier," a term coined by the French linguist Ferdinand Saussure to describe a fragment of a work that an artist or writer might remove and replace with another, different component, creating an unnatural sequence of images or events.

MANY GALLERIES stay open later on the first Friday of the month. Some schedule special events for second Fridays. Here's what's happening tonight and this month at art spaces around the region. Artists' House Gallery. 57 N. 2nd St., 215-923-8440, artistshouse.com . Oil paintings and pastels by various artists. Through April 29. Reception 5-8:30 p.m. Friday. Bridgette Mayer Gallery. 709 Walnut St., 215-413-8893, www.bridgettemayergallery.com . "German Gómez: Diary Portraits.

Pentimenti Gallery regular Steven Baris continues to study and interpret the elasticity and ambiguity of the exurban landscape and its big-box architecture in his recent geometric paintings on canvas and Mylar, and his painted Plexiglas wall sculptures. In particular, his large oil paintings on canvas, showing diagrammatic outlines floating in milky atmospheres, express the banality and soullessness of the exurbs. Baris also has created an installation for the gallery's Project Room, "Exurban Archipelago," that includes a video of a distribution center that appears to have been shot by Baris through the windows of a moving car; it captures the facility's anonymous contours to a T. Baris' work is nicely complemented by Kim Beck's large graphite drawings, in which she reorganizes the typical suburban and exurban landscape into complex compositions with cutouts.

Sound of dancing Beginning with a performance on Dec. 16, Nick Cave's installation at the Fabric Workshop and Museum will feature costume-cum-sculpture "sound suits" that make noise (215-568-8888 or www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org ). Back to basics Israeli artist and curator Doron Rabina has brought together 20 artists from Israel, Europe, and the United States at the Institute of Contemporary Art to examine the relationship between originality and origin. Opened Wednesday, through Dec. 4 (215-898-7108 or www.icaphila.org )

If "Scripted" strikes you as an unusually cutting-edge exhibition for Gross McCleaf Gallery, no need to worry that this familiar outpost of contemporary realist painting is changing its focus. It's summer and the gallery's director, Sharon Ewing, decided to let her assistant director, Todd Keyser, a painter who just received his master's in fine art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, stir things up. Keyser has not disappointed. "Scripted" is a remarkable show of 10 artists whose works make ample use of the "arbitrary signifier," a term coined by the French linguist Ferdinand Saussure to describe a fragment of a work that an artist or writer might remove and replace with another, different component, creating an unnatural sequence of images or events.

For some, it's a lot like a sport, as adventuresome and energizing as running a favorite race or hiking along a wonderful new trail. What is? A plein-air festival. This increasingly popular occasion of outdoor art-making is spreading rapidly. Kutztown has one (last month). Philadelphia has one (this month). And the Wayne Art Center has a splendid one - last month and this month. Plein air festivals involve landscape painting done outdoors, in the open air - rain or shine - for several days.

One month after completing high school, Master Sgt. Martin Cervantez enlisted in the U.S. Army as an illustrator without any formal artistic training. Now, 24 years after he began illustrating leaflets and pamphlets during the propaganda-heavy Cold War, Cervantez, 42, serves as the Army's artist-in-residence, a position crafted to document history through art from the front lines. "I have the best job in the Army," Cervantez said. "Most people don't know a position like this exists, but it's a grand job I get to do, documenting history.

Friday-Sunday Break it down Illadelph, Philadelphia's longest continually running hip-hop festival, will be this weekend at the University of the Arts' Terra Building, 211 S. Broad St. The 11th festival features a full schedule of master classes, lecture demonstrations, open jam sessions, and panel discussions from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Featured instructors include Eva Shou, a Swedish waacking teacher, and hip-hop teacher Buddha Stretch. Tickets are $99 for a day pass or $25 per class.

Eileen Goodman is that agreeable thing, a painterly painter. And like her sensibility, her paintings of large, branching fruited or flowering plants and occasional still lifes shrug off the prescribed boundaries of any one medium in her "New Works" show at Gross McCleaf. So, where did Goodman get the experience she needed for big, bold works of this kind that you would swear were oil paintings, but are actually watercolors? Goodman has an oil-painting background, yet has painted only in watercolor for years.

Scott Noel's oil paintings at Gross McCleaf seem casual like a snapshot. They focus on a center of interest - very often on a multitude of still-life objects, but also on people indoors with window views of Noel's Roxborough/Manayunk neighborhood. In these paintings, he tries to link the home and studio experiences of an artist, portraying them while suggesting a content beyond that represented. Noel is a prominent artist in mid-career who gives us the pleasure to be had from his paintings, and doesn't burden us with the hard thought or hard work that has gone into creating such color-rich and light-filled images.

Like body parts on a cubist canvas, the self-told tale of Luc Sonnet, "international fine artist," never quite fit together. He claimed a childhood in the vineyards of Bordeaux, an internship at age 17 with Picasso, and a wealthy, discerning clientele willing to shell out as much as $250,000 for his oil paintings. "An admired friend of many 20th-century artists, he influenced the concept and technique reflected in works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Bofill," Sonnet wrote about himself in a 2005 letter of introduction to a New York art gallery.