Painters

Forty years ago, Mian Situ was a poor boy in China, endlessly sketching while the chickens scratched in a corner. He didn't spend a lot of time researching subjects. He just drew Mao, and then he drew Mao some more. "Every day, Mao," Situ said. "I thought he had the most wonderful face in the world." It's different now. To begin with, the artist lives in a gated neighborhood in San Dimas. A big-screen Sony TV sits in the corner of his living room.

It's an artistic mystery whose hottest clue is a fingerprint. "The Adoration of the Christ Child," a painting hanging in Rome's Galleria Borghese, is attributed to Fra Bartolomeo, but a newly discovered fingerprint in the paint, along with stylistic similarities, are making experts think of Leonardo da Vinci, who sometimes left a digital imprint on his works as a sort of signature.

When Jack Goldstein hanged himself last March, his death was both predictable and surprising to his family and friends. The painter, who had been an influential student at CalArts and a star of the New York art scene in the 1980s, was known to be struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol.

A Dutch museum dedicated to the life of Vincent van Gogh said Thursday that it had unveiled a newly discovered letter by the 19th century painter, shedding fresh light on his turbulent life. The two-page letter, written Aug. 3, 1877, was recently discovered in a private collection and has gone on temporary loan to Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. The museum, which houses more than 200 of his paintings and 600 drawings, said it was the first previously unknown Van Gogh letter to surface since 1990.

Unlike David Hockney, Lucian Freud is inaccessible. He rarely grants interviews, and has chosen an emissary to speak for him. William Feaver is James Boswell to Freud's Samuel Johnson, Morris Engelberg to his Joe DiMaggio. Sitting in his home office in Clapham, a less fashionable area miles from Freud's studio, Feaver is surrounded by the painter's life. His desk is strewn with upcoming projects, assorted correspondence and art catalogs. A whippet related to Freud's Pluto sleeps in the corner.

Edouard Vuillard, the red-bearded French painter of small, intimate scenes and large decorative panels, stood at the height of the avant-garde in art during the 1890s. No one seemed more daring than Vuillard and his associates in Paris. But time -- and the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse -- swiftly passed them by.

In a low-slung brick building on Washington Boulevard, across from Joe Boone's Barbershop and within smelling distance of Rick's Fish & Chips, Charles Garabedian drapes two recent paintings over the billiard table in his studio. Other works -- colorful squiggles on large sheets of paper -- are tacked to one wall. Hanging opposite them is his endurance piece: a painting 13 years in the making. "It was really a lousy painting. There was a lot of bad thinking in it," he says.

Steadying his right elbow on his left wrist, Richard Bunkall dips a long, thin brush into umber paint and applies it to the big canvas. Then he backs off in his motorized chair--taking care not to run over William, the faithful golden retriever always at his side--and scrutinizes his painting. The artist is facing a deadline, having promised 10 new pieces for an exhibit opening this week at the Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena.

"Having a baby completely changed my life," said painter Monique Prieto, flashing a dimpled smile. "It's the most important thing that's influenced my work--and changed it for the better." Guillermo, now 2, was joined in February by brother Emmet. Evidently, more is more: Prieto, who emerged from grad school just three years ago, has since received praise from curators and critics on both coasts.