Painting

Passersby on Broad Street can't help but notice the giant paint glob. It sits on the sidewalk, like a six-foot-high swirl of soft-serve ice cream, only brilliant orange, next to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, across from the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The dollop's positioned to appear dropped from the top of the collosal brush of Claes Oldenburg's "Paint Torch," which towers several stories above. Few have probably noticed, though, that the blob is now backwards.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — When coming up with the theme for the June invitational art exhibition at the Ocean City Arts Center, president Jack Devine knew he didn't want lighthouses, dunes, or jetties. "That's the last thing we want," Devine said. "We have that out the window. I wanted something else. " And so, naturally, it was just a short hop of a wave from a beach landscape to a theme about Wanamakers. Wanamakers? "I had this idea of celebrating Wanamakers," he said, "because so many people in the area have a connection to the store.

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.

Abington Art Center's Solo Series 2012 exhibition, featuring four area artists, leads off with Heather Ujiie's spectacular envronmental piece Resurrection , a mural-esque textile installation that evokes the survival of untamed nature as an irreducible, lyrical presence. This Langhorne designer's patterned narrative combines painting by hand, drawing, stitching, and large-format digital painting. The loose richness of her elaborate inkjet images - animals, birds, and a kneeling figure in the light of dawn - shows keen interest in interpreting light with embroidered clusters of highly reflective glassy beads.

Against the backdrop of a gray primer, painters fill in numbered squares and stripes with the corresponding shade of blue, red or yellow. But this isn't paint by numbers. This is the 2500 block of Germantown Avenue in North Philadelphia, and the first of more than 100 buildings being painted for Mural Arts Program's Philly Painting. The project, now in its third week of painting, is Mural Arts' largest endeavor yet. In addition to bringing in Dutch painting duo Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, the geometric murals will stretch from the 2500 to the 2800 blocks of Germantown and include a large-scale mural in Center City.

Question: I have a home, built about 1950, that has tin siding. Can or should this siding be repainted (and how?), or is it best to remove it and install new siding, such as vinyl? Answer: I've seen a lot of evidence that tin siding can be repainted, although I haven't found much information on how to do it. I had tin gutters — actually terne, a zinc/tin alloy — on my turn-of-the-20th-century former house. The experts recommended Tin-O-Lin, which I bought at a Philadelphia roofing supplier, a slow-drying linseed oil-based primer and finish coat recommended for spot priming exposed and rusted areas.

Here's the funny thing about Art, Yasmina Reza's much-produced comic drama about three men and a painting: It's truly a matter of perspective. A director can go serious with it, or sharp, as Act II Playhouse's Bud Martin did earlier this season, or, as is the case with Hedgerow Theatre's Penelope Reed, she can blunt its edges and treat it as a light comedy. And it will still suit the room. It's handy that this script yields so willingly to a company's point of view. Translated from the original French by Christopher Hampton, its catalyst is a white-on-white canvas purchased for 200,000 francs that reflects all the colors and shades in the longtime friendship among three men: Marc (Tom Teti)

A car struck three men painting a fence Saturday in Northeast Philadelphia, killing one of them and injuring the others, authorities said. The crash happened about 6:45 a.m. in the Bustleton section of the city, police said. A 42-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after he was hit by the car. His name was not released. Two other painters were taken to Aria Hospital-Torresdale for treatment of minor injuries,officials said. Police said the 22-year-old driver was also taken there for treatment of shoulder pain.

Looking at a Neil Anderson painting can be like listening to the waves breaking - always different, always the same. The rhythms of his lines evoke for me an image of natural phenomena that is, at the same time, steadfastly abstract. An odd mixture of refined elegance and rigorous constructivism is what gives his paintings their edge in the Bridgette Mayer Gallery exhibition by this Lewisburg, Pa., artist. Lots of colorful incident prevents them from being read too simply; Anderson's goal, I think, is to entice the viewer into a closer examination of things there to be discovered.

MANCHESTER, England - In a city that's more used to a sea of red during title celebrations, it was blue confetti that fell over the streets of Manchester on Monday. About 100,000 fans packed the streets as Manchester City paraded the Premier League trophy through the city to celebrate its first English title in 44 years. Blue and white ticker-tape and streamers rained down on the team bus as City players showed off the trophy they had wrestled away from crosstown rival Manchester United in nailbiting fashion a day earlier.