Artists

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

In the smart, involving documentary "Indie Game: the Movie," when video game designer Phil Fish chillingly asserts that he'd kill himself if he didn't finish his long-gestating game "Fez," you get the feeling he isn't bluffing. That's the level of depth and candor filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky mine here as they profile several independent artists struggling to succeed in the highly corporatized - and often hugely lucrative - video game industry. In addition to the French-Canadian Fish, who spent more than four nerve-wracking years developing the much anticipated, aesthetically oriented "Fez," the movie also compellingly follows the long distance, rollercoaster collaboration between designer Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes as they create "Super Meat Boy," their first major game for Xbox (it went on to sell more than 1 million copies)

Thomas Kinkade is famous for his luminous landscapes and street scenes, those dreamy, deliberately inspirational images he says have brought "God's light" into people's lives, even as they have made him one of America's most collected artists. A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush -- and his life -- for the last 20 years.

WASHINGTON - Joan Miró, the great Spanish painter of dreams and symbols, lived through so many harrowing eras of the 20th century that critics believe his masterpieces surely reflect the tensions of political events in one way or another. But Miró's world of art was so special - with stars and moons, biomorphs and delightful dogs and sly monsters and wonderful color - that it has always been difficult to find much politics there. An exhibition that just arrived at the National Gallery of Art - "Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape" - makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the politics.

Fake-check scams have been around for a while. But here's the first one I've seen that specifically preys on artists. When not editing the magazine Tango Reporter — which, yes, covers the sultry world of tango aficionados — Carlos G. Groppa paints cheerful watercolor landscapes depicting cottages, gardens and other friendly subjects that one could easily imagine seeing on the wall of a hotel room or at the doctor's office. Groppa, 80, of West Hollywood, sells his original art online.

Remember them? The big-eyed waifs? They hung in Woolworth's, next to the velvet Elvi, or maybe it was Walgreen's, by the clowns. Wherever, you knew you weren't in the Louvre. But you probably didn't know that the man who claimed to have painted the tearful tots didn't paint them at all. The artist was his long-suffering wife, who worked behind locked doors while he took the credit and showmanshipped himself to world fame. She, however, is getting the last laugh.

The details of the mural that helped save Bill Salamon's life escape him now. * It took up one wall in the cafeteria where his Nazi captors would enjoy their meals. A picture of a German soldier sitting on a bench, his arm casually draped around a young girl's shoulder, he recalls. He was 16 when he painted it. "I probably survived the concentration camp because I knew how to paint and draw," says Salamon.

The arrival of the "Lego Man" in America was like something out of a 3-year-old's dream. The 8-foot-tall, 100-pound fiberglass statue that resembles the little plastic guys that come in a Lego set was discovered bobbing gently in ankle-deep surf at Siesta Key Beach in Sarasota, Fla. The front of his shirt was emblazoned with a message in fractured English: "NO REAL THAN YOU ARE. " The name "Ego Leonard" was written on his back. The town of 52,000 is known for many things -- snowbirds; sport fishing; white sandy beaches; the influence of circus impresario Charles Ringling, who helped develop the area.

"I hope that I'm not just producing propaganda," says Texas-born Chicano artist Luis Jimenez, who depicts working-class Mexican and Chicano folk and seeks to bring a human dimension to stereotypes such as undocumented workers and lowriders.

"Once, I thought that being a Catholic Chicana from El Paso were three strikes against me. Now, that is precisely where I draw my material." Celia Alvarez Munoz has spoken and written these words many times over her career of the last 10 years, and they seem to sum up the dilemma that she continues to face. While the art world encourages individualism, being too different can leave one on the outside. Fashions tend toward generalizations, artists fit into schools, groups, trends.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

BEIJING - Orgies and anal sex hardly seem the usual fodder of traditional Chinese folk art, but that is exactly what one Chinese artist is depicting in a series of provocative paper-cuts that are now being exhibited in Los Angeles for the first time. Paper-cuts originated in Eastern Han Dynasty China (AD 25-220) and are hung on windows or doors for good luck. But instead of the usual decorative flowers and birds, Xiyadie, whose pseudonym means "Siberian Butterfly," portrays graphic and daring depictions of homosexual love - long considered taboo in China.

NEW YORK - "A snake swallowing an elephant" is how the Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong described himself. The snake was the Chinese artist in him, and the elephant was Western art. The stylistic fusion that made him one of China'sleading modern artists is on view at the Asia Society Museum here in "Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong," which also reflects the artist's long life amid the turmoil of China's 20th century. Wu died in 2010 at 90, and these works from his last decades - depicting nature and architecture, some more naturalistic, others mostly abstract - show his easy cohabitation of two cultural hemispheres.

Robert Miles Parker, a free-spirited artist who sparked an architectural preservation movement in San Diego and translated the personalities of Los Angeles and New York into distinctive pen-and-ink drawings of their buildings, has died. He was 72. His partner, David Van Leer, said that the cause was unknown, but that Parker, who died April 17 at his home in New York City, had numerous health problems since being diagnosed with AIDS 20 years ago. Parker published three collections of his drawings, which include "Images of American Architecture" (1981)

Dragons, graffiti, cartoon heroes. Gajin Fujita is known for mixing Japanese art with L.A. street and pop culture in paintings fueled by his eclectic imagination and experiences as a Japanese American from Boyle Heights. The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena is spotlighting a major influence on these East-meets-Eastside creations: Fujita's passion for ukiyo-e , the woodblock prints that flourished in 17th- to 19th-century Japan. "Gajin Fujita: Ukiyo-e in Contemporary Painting," which opened in April, is what curator Bridget Bray calls "a focused solo exhibition of five pieces in which you see parallels to the print tradition such as dynamic compositions, martial figures, attention to surface detail and dramatization of the natural and supernatural worlds.

In a short video produced by LA Louver in advance of Ben Jackel's solo show, one encounters the artist taking an ax, quite literally, to one of his sculptures. He's chipping away at a block of Douglas fir to form an enormous replica of the head of a pole-mounted weapon called a halberd, in a style traditionally carried by the personal guards of the elders of Saxony around the year 1600 - as he quickly clarifies when I mistakenly call it a spearhead. The piece, which, at 131/2 feet tall, would clearly do damage if it fell on you, is titled "Pay Attention.

The rich and famous don't come by Al Shelton's place in Studio City as often as they once did. For one thing, the barrel-bellied ex-bronco buster has outlived Gene Autry, Steve McQueen, Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable, Jack Lemmon and other celebrity patrons who once clamored for the custom-crafted leatherwork embossed with Shelton's iconic cowpoke imagery. Then too, westerns aren't what they used to be. And that's OK by him.

The colorful Los Angeles Art Show will have more than 100 international exhibitors, a lecture series and special events. Highlights include a sculpture garden, art exhibits and installations, and a fine art fair that will offer viewing and sales of prints, including antiques and the works of modern masters. L.A. Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. today to Sun. $20. (213) 741-1151. www.laartshow.com.

As exhibition titles go, "Meticulosity" is more of a speed bump than an open door or clearly marked path. The term looks familiar but sounds odd. It compels us to slow down, proceed with care. "We tried to stake out a word that's not commonly used, so people wouldn't bring a fixed meaning to it," explains writer and independent curator John David O'Brien, who organized the group show at Otis College of Art and Design's Ben Maltz Gallery with director Meg Linton. "Meticulosity" is an antiquated term for "scrupulousness," with origins in the Latin root for "fearful" -- a nod, write the curators in their manifesto-like catalog essay, to the urgency and meaning that are at stake in the art they've gathered.

Five years after he was first indicted and after two prosecutions ended in mistrials, a Los Angeles-based maker and distributor of niche fetish films was convicted Friday of federal obscenity charges. Ira Isaacs, who produced, sold and sometimes acted in films depicting scatology and bestiality, was convicted on five counts of selling and distributing obscene material, based on films he sold through a site he advertised as "the Web's largest fetish VHS, DVD superstore. " The seven-woman, five-man jury deliberated for less than two hours Friday after a weeklong trial, the bulk of which was made up of the screening of four films, two of them Isaacs' own creations.