Painters

THE ARGUMENT between painting and photography has been going on 150 years ever since the invention of photography.I came away from a recent show at the Maryland Institute, College of Art feeling that photographers are still fighting the old battle for recognition as artists, only on different terrain from their predecessors.Instead of competing with painters in such traditional forms as still life, landscape and the nude, they are struggling to stake photography's claim to postmodern notions of art as deconstruction and performance.

One day in 1968 when Juan and Abel Velazquez were 15 years old, their father sat them down and placed before them canvases of black velvet. Jose Velazquez had been a boxer in Mexico City. Later, he taught himself cartooning and, from there, to paint on velvet, which is how he was supporting his family. "Time for playing is over," he told them. "It's time to make money." He took up a brush, dabbed it in pink paint and handed down to his sons the one craft he knew. Starting with a simple classic of Tijuana velvet, he taught them to paint the Pink Panther.

Jacques Maroger (1884-1962) was a French painter and conservator at the Louvre who believed that the old masters achieved greater brilliance with their paints than modern artists, and sought a way of mixing paints that would replicate that brilliance.After considerable research, he discovered a method, involving boiling oil and varnish, and was praised by many including the artists Raoul Dufy and Augustus John and the critic Roger Fry.In 1939 he came to this country and subsequently to Baltimore where he taught at the Maryland Institute.

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney (Viking Studio, 296 pages, $60). David Hockney's two-year purposeful pursuit of his proposition that many of the Old Master painters used lenses and / or prisms as aids to their draftsmanship has now been seminared, colloquiumed, discoursed and debated all over the world -- and remains the most intriguing arts controversy in decades. Hockney is not only a historically important and innovative painter in his own right; he is a splendid arts detective and theorist.

Cynthia McBride thinks Annapolis is the perfect city for art to flourish. "It's a beautiful small city on the water," she said. "Artists are attracted to beautiful cities, they want to come paint here." With this in mind, the McBride Gallery and 19 other galleries in downtown Annapolis are coming together for the 16th Annapolis Art Walk tonight. Not only will the 20 galleries host unique exhibits for the night, many with live music, but many artists will also be in attendance, giving demonstrations in a variety of techniques and disciplines.

A labor dispute that caused six painters to walk picket lines at two Columbia office buildings over the past week may end today, a union representative says.Workers in the local International Brotherhood of Painters Inc. union were seeking a 40-cent increase in the hourly wages paid by 20 contractors. But L. A. Mangum and Son Inc. of Landover refused to sign the three-year agreement when the other companies did.The refusal spurred the weeklong protest outside two of his job sites, the American City Building and the Amdahl building on Little Patuxent Parkway, organizers said.

DURING THE languid days of August, people seek thrills. Some sail in front of freighters, some swim near hungry sharks, some parachute onto national monuments. As for me, I have recently discovered the joy of pole painting. As the name suggests, pole painting consists of using an adjustable extension pole to apply paint to hard-to-reach surfaces. But the pole-painting experience is much more rich and varied than this simple explanation. There is, for example, the accompanying pleasure of pole sanding - roughing up surfaces with high-flying sandpaper - and the pure bliss that comes from pole edging, artfully painting pinnacle nooks and crannies.

Within the protective sanctuary of his studio, Picasso imagined himself as a modern-day satyr, as a disembodied head summoning beautiful female forms into existence, even as Pygmalion, the mythical Greek sculptor of antiquity who created a marble statue of a woman so lifelike that he fell in love with her. For Picasso, as for generations of artists before him and since, the studio was a unique place rich in associations - not only a magical site of...

LORD KNOWS, I'm not the handiest person to have around. Typically if you see me with a hammer or screwdriver, I've either been forced to respond to some household emergency or am performing some mundane task that even a lummox like me couldn't botch.I've tried to be handy ever since my wife and I first departed the ranks of apartment dwellers to become homeowners 18 years ago. But it didn't take long to figure out that any savings expected by "doing it myself" was offset by the cost of having to do it two or three times to get it right.

While hundreds of thousands of federal workers brace for unpaid furloughs starting next month, Uncle Sam is still looking to hire. In one week alone this month, nearly 2,200 job listings available to the public were posted on USAJobs.gov, the federal government's recruiting site. Add in new postings open only to current or former federal workers , including those laid off, and the number of new openings jumps to more than 4,600. "One thing for sure about hiring freezes: They always begin to melt as soon as they are put into place," said Don Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy at College Park.