Painting

The tone is often whimsically morbid in Henryk Fantazos' painting show at the Art Alliance. An artist born and professionally trained in Poland and who settled in North Carolina just over a dozen years ago, Fantazos is a strange painter. And his better paintings have a distinct presence about them - a raw melodramatic vividness with a theatrical slant. The issues with which he concerns himself are basically symbolism and storytelling potential. So he electrifies the stillness of the Art Alliance with a feeling of anticipation, as we look from painting to painting.

Meg Fish seems like a guileless, sweet-natured, energetic small-town girl - which she is. She's also among the most prolific Philadelphia wall painters since the infamous "Cornbread" and "Cool Earl" spray-painted the town back in the 1970s. Unlike the two graffiti vandals, Fish is a talented and trained artist who has found her niche on the bare walls of Philadelphia and suburban factories and offices. Unlike most young art-school graduates forced to work in other fields, Fish is making a decent living from her wall painting.

For 10 years now, since he stopped painting in art school because the paints he was using were making him ill, Stephen Talasnik has been, as he says with tongue firmly in cheek, "just drawing. " And with successive exhibitions of his work during the last few years, he has effectively demolished the notion that drawing cannot achieve the equivalent expressive power of painting or sculpture. Since he resigned last year as gallery coordinator at the Fleisher Art Memorial, Talasnik has been able to devote more time to his art. The results of this activity are evident in two current solo exhibitions, in the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at Dolan/Maxwell Gallery.

Faced with broad criticism of the proposed sale of Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, officials at Thomas Jefferson University have now asked senior faculty and staff for alternative suggestions on how money from the record $68 million sale might be spent. When the surprise deal for the monumental painting was announced on Friday, president Robert Barchi and Brian Harrison, board chairman, asserted that the funds would fuel the planned expansion of the university and the revamping of its educational programming - which they characterized as "transformational.

People and cameras see in fundamentally different ways. For one thing, most cameras have only one eye. This difference became manifest in the mid-1960s and early '70s, when the photorealists made true-to-life paintings of photographs. Painters are still using photographs as source material, keeping alive the dialogue between painterly and photographic visions. Much of what they're doing directly recalls that 30 years ago artists such as Malcolm Morley and Gerhard Richter pushed photographic realism in the direction of the painter's more contrived reality, but without losing the camera's distinctive point of view.

Mid-May brought artists from 17 states to participate in Wayne Art Center's Sixth Annual Plein Air Festival. Most of the 23 artists accepted for this increasingly competitive event came from a distance and were guests of local families while painting landscapes in and around Wayne for five festival days. The weather cooperated, and the art center hung the work as fast as it came in - hundreds of paintings, all for sale. Shelby Keefe, a full-time artist from Milwaukee, deservedly won two awards, best in show and Plein Air Magazine's prize, for an oil landscape portraying Ithan and one of Center City, respectively.

Chester County artist George Cope came of age when audiences would pay a quarter to view epic landscapes and grand canvases amid potted plants and velvet drapes. Cope, born in 1855, grew up in a Quaker farming family and launched his career by exhibiting his work in storefronts and drug stores. Today, Cope's work is not widely known, although several of his paintings are part of the permanent collection of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford. In the late 1880s, Cope was a celebrity artist, but not because of his views of Chester County farms and homes.

Under pressure from City Council members and community groups, SEPTA has all but decided to abandon its proposal to locate bus-painting booths at four neighborhood depots and look for new sites in industrial areas. SEPTA's change of heart comes almost three years after it proposed to locate the booths at the Germantown Avenue, Allegheny Avenue, Comly Street and Callowhill Street depots. "We have not finally decided, but we are moving strongly in that direction," SEPTA General Manager Louis Gambaccini said.

Nearly every day for the last two months, Lucien Crump had gone to Our Lady of the Rosary Church in West Philadelphia, spending as many as 15 hours at a stretch, sometimes an entire night. And although Crump is a devout man and often said silent prayers during his visits, his purpose was not solely contemplation of his Creator, but creation. Crump, 61, is an accomplished Philadelphia artist commissioned by the church to paint a monumental 14-foot-by-28-foot depiction of the Crucifixion on a canvas hanging behind the altar of the cavernous, 800-seat church at 63d and Callowhill Streets.

Raymond, 8, just loves music, whether it's singing nursery rhymes or listening to songs on his Walkman. Very artistic and creative, he enjoys painting and drawing. His favorite activity is playing on the computer. Diagnosed with autism, Raymond has made tremendous progress in a highly specialized educational program. His growth is attributed to his personality. Gentle, affectionate and cooperative, he is eager to please and follows directions well. His teacher says he is very bright and "a joy to have in the classroom.