Painting

Frank F. English spent the last 12 years of his life in Point Pleasant, Bucks County, painting the nearby countryside in a series of rich watercolor and oil tableaux. While he worked outside the inner circle of established art communities, he mastered the landscapes so familiar to the area - the riverside along the Delaware, views of the canal and the quiet, country places near his home, called the Brambles. Forty of English's works will be exhibited tomorrow through July 15 at Bianco Gallery, 3921 Route 202, Buckingham.

Relax, crank up some tunes, pour a little wine. Oh, and maybe paint some, too. Two local franchises of Painting With a Twist, which crosses a night out with amateur painting lessons, are betting on the creativity of fun-loving grown-ups and their children. The premise: Pick a night to head to the studio and then re-create a painting of your choice, with some help from friendly art teachers, as you sip whatever you brought to drink - wine, or beer, or chocolate milk. "It's fun art, not fine art," said Jennifer Elwell, owner of the Skippack studio.

Joyce Robins' painted ceramic works are as much painting and sculpture as they are ceramics. One of a group that art critic John Perreault dubbed the New York School of Ceramics - artists who for any number of reasons happened to be working in clay but considered themselves accidental ceramists - Robins was a painter who initially used clay to make foliage for her paintings of abstracted landscapes. At a time when the hard-and-fast rules about what constituted painting and sculpture were being bent and broken by artists like Richard Tuttle, turning clay into sculptural support for paint seemed a natural to Robins.

The Thomas Eakins painting The Gross Clinic is to art what Moby-Dick is to literature, said Stan Bielen, who helped organize a march yesterday in front of Thomas Jefferson University's Alumni Hall, where the famous artwork is displayed. It's what Michael Jordan is to basketball, and it's a Philadelphia icon that shouldn't be removed, Bielen argued. Bielen and 30 others, mostly artists, were protesting the $68 million sale of the painting to outsiders who soon may whisk it away to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and later to an Arkansas museum being planned by Wal-Mart heirs.

The 16th-century portrait was a bargaining chip in the spring of 1943. Friedrich and Louise Gutmann, a Jewish couple from a prominent banking family, hoped to trade it for their lives. Adolf Hitler's art dealer ordered the painting, along with others from the famous Gutmann collection, shipped to Germany in exchange for the couple's safe passage from the Netherlands to Italy. But the Nazis reneged on the deal. The Gutmanns ended up in concentration camps, where they died, and their 1509 painting - Portrait of a Young Man by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien - mysteriously disappeared on the way to Berlin.

After dropping out of college in his freshman year, Jim Hautman didn't have to go far to find his calling. His father and mother both were accomplished artists and they prodded their son toward painting. Now, Hautman, a Minnesotan, is the winner of the federal duck stamp contest and soon will become a millionaire. And at 25, he is believed to be the youngest artist to win the contest. His acrylic of two black-bellied whistling ducks in flight over a cypress swamp was selected over 602 other entries to appear on the 1990 $12.50 duck stamp, also known as the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Revenue Stamp.

For the first time in at least 30 years, a piece of art has been stolen from the Mercer Museum. On April 1, a watercolor painted by local amateur artist Edward Trego was discovered missing from the fifth floor of the museum, at Ashland and Pine Streets. The unframed painting, about the size of a greeting card, had been hanging on a wall, covered by a piece of laminate for protection. Its value was listed as $50. Museum curator Cory Amsler said it was most likely a matter of convenience that prompted the thief to take it. "It wasn't secured, so it was easier to work off the wall.

Wasn't one global anxiety attack enough? Yet here the world trembles, 10 years after another version of the famous painting, The Scream, was stolen (and since recovered). This time, armed bandits brazenly nabbed another Scream, along with a painting titled Madonna, during daylight from the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. Last month, an anonymous donor purchased the tiny Johannes Vermeer 17th century portrait, Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, for an unexpectedly high $30 million.

Philadelphians have been eloquent in their anguished anger at Thomas Jefferson University's sale of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic to the National Gallery and a proposed museum in Bentonville, Ark., backed by Wal-Mart heirs. I sympathize with efforts to raise $68 million to keep the painting here. But the city's and region's patrons are already pressed to support our wonderful artistic and cultural organizations. I suggest a use of funds that will better serve our cultural institutions and present the city to the world.

Inaugural exhibits commonly take refuge in the past. But not the one that opens at the Widener University Art Museum on Tuesday - eight days after Chester's newly elected leaders took office. That exhibit, featuring paintings by Wallingford's Randall L. Exon, clearly looks to the future and salutes this city and its 42,000 inhabitants in optimistic terms. In these landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings, Exon, who teaches art at Swarthmore College, presents us with something mildly stimulating to memory and the imagination, possibly poetic and certainly picturesque.