Graffiti artist or malicious property destroyer? Boston authorities simply say “criminal,” and the talented Frank Shepard Fairey got two years probation today for a graffiti case from 2000 in Brighton and two charges this year in Back Bay.

Prosecutors, in return for a guilty plea on the three charges, dropped 11 other defacing property cases against him.

“I am very pleased that a reasonable resolution to my court cases in Boston has been reached,” Fairey said in a statement. “I want to apologize to the City of Boston for posting my art in unauthorized spaces without the consent of the owner.”

“I believe in the importance of making art accessible through many avenues, and I will continue to advocate the use of legal public spaces for meaningful artistic expression and communication,” he said. “Freedom of expression is the bedrock of our democracy. However, I also believe it is important that people respect private property.”

“Shepard looks forward to continuing to bring his art to people everywhere whether it is inside a museum or in publicly available spaces,” said Jay Strell, a spokesman for Fairey. “As an artist with a traveling exhibition surveying two decades of his work, which includes many examples of public art and the iconic Obama ‘Hope’ poster, Shepard believes that it is important for artists everywhere to have access to public spaces to display their work, but do so in a respectful manner.”

Fairey will return to Boston on July 31 for a closing party at the Institute of Contemporary Art to celebrate the end of his exhibition there, which ends August 16.

“We are thrilled to learn that Shepard Fairey’s legal issues with the Boston Police have been resolved,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA. “With this matter now behind him, the focus of the conversation can return to where it belongs: on Fairey’s artistic accomplishments.”

According to Strell, the show has drawn more than 100,000 visitors. The Fairey show will next turn to Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum in the fall.

He has photographed soldiers in Vietnam. He has filmed news in the United States and the Middle East. He has painted Saudi Arabian kings as well as his young granddaughter, portrayed in a frilly nightgown flying over Nantucket, sprinkling stardust onto the twinkling land below.

Award-winning artist Peter T. Quidley deserves a prize for versatility. You can see his range for yourself at Quidley & Company (118 Newbury Street), where his works are on display through June 25.

It is difficult to believe that this Boston native taught himself how to paint. His signature technique, glazing, involves applying very thin layers of oil paint to paneling, allowing light to shine through. He then applies varnish and finely sands the piece, buffing it to a glass-like shine. Without knowing about his technique, it would be easy to bet (and lose!) that some of his pieces, especially “The Sketch” (see picture at right) are set behind glass.

The glazing effect also gives his pieces a luminous quality, as if they are bathed in sunshine. The effect can seem as somewhat of a purposeful contradiction. Take his piece “The Storm” in which two women are walking on a beach; one woman is in a long, flowing dress, and the other is wrapped in a towel. Their backs are turned to the viewer, who acts as an observer walking behind them. The scene is in soft focus, with light wisps of pink, blue, and white. It’s serene and airy, save for the gray clouds entering the scene in the distance, competing with a light blue sky. The women, linking arms, walk slowly toward the storm clouds, not seeming to notice or care. The painting’s luminescence causes the viewer to almost have to search for any sign of the storm after which the piece is named.

“Stardust” which features Quidley’s granddaughter, nearly sparkles off the wall. His subjects, as in this piece, are often in nightgowns or in long, flowing dresses adorned with lace, which adds to the ethereal quality of his works. The women in his life “" his daughter and granddaughter, for example “" are his muses. His paintings act as windows looking out on moments in time, whether real or imagined. His eye for detail and composition speaks to his experience behind the camera lens.

His works take up only a small space in the back of the modestly sized Quidley & Company “" which is owned by the artist’s son, Chris “" but putting together a show at all is a challenge, said Rob Giacchetti, managing partner of the company.

“His work is so sought after that it’s unusual to have this many pieces” he said.

Because of the intricacy of his technique, Quidley paints only eight to 12 works a year. And unless you’ve got as much money as a Saudi Arabian king, his prices will astound you; “The Storm” is priced at $8,500, “The Sketch” at $42,000, and “Labor of Love”? $67,500! But can you really put a price on a work of art? For the rest of us, many of his prints can be found on the artist’s website, www.Quidley.com, for $25 to a few hundred dollars.

And though relatively speaking the exhibit may house an impressive number of Quidley’s works, don’t expect to spend all day there; it is a small collection that deserves a look while spending the day shopping or dining on Newbury Street.

For a long, long time it has been widely accepted that the mentally ill and immensely talented Dutch artist, Vincent Van Gogh, chopped off his own earlobe with a razor. People have made jokes about it for decades and it’s been a pop culture reference for just as long.

But it may not be true.

A new book, based on the original police report of the event, suggests that Van Gogh’s friend, French post-impressionist Paul Gauguin, may have swiped off Van Gogh’s ear with a sword during a rift outside a brothel.

Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, the authors of “In Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence”, argue that the original historical account is inaccurate and contains several irregularities.

Kaufmann and Wildegans looked at witness reports and letters exchanged between the artists, and have since concluded that Gauguin was the one responsible for carving Van Gogh’s lobe clean off his head. The German scholars also claim that Van Gogh then wrapped his severed ear in cloth and handed it to a prostitute named Rachel, according to the BBC.

Kauffman says they do not know whether the act was intentional, however they are certain that the legendary artists agreed to invent and push the story that Van Gogh cut it off himself in order to protect Gauguin. That makes it sound like it was an accident, though I don’t see how you can cut someone’s ear off by accident.

In the legendary tale, Gauguin was not present when Van Gogh cut his ear off. “As for Van Gogh, he didn’t confirm anything. Their behaviour afterwards and various suggestions by the protagonists indicate they were hiding the truth” Kauffman told France-based Le Figaro newspaper.

So did Gauguin force Van Gogh to go along with the myth that he de-eared himself? Or was it really an accident that Gauguin, an avid fencer, chopped it off outside a brothel? It may never be known.

Van Gogh later moved to Tahiti, and then to France where he died after shooting himself in the chest. Maybe that was Gauguin, too.

CHESTNUT HILL — Imagine walking into someone’s home and seeing a child’s drawing on the refrigerator. It’s filled from edge to edge with bright colors, wobbly lines and adorable depictions of everyday scenes. Now imagine taking a closer look at that drawing and noticing that in it there is a helicopter shooting bullets at a person who’s lying dead on the ground with blood coming out of his head. Meanwhile, a lime green and pink tank spits bullets at a cozy yellow and orange home made up of the most basic of shapes.

A child who escaped the nightmare in Darfur drew this disturbing image coated in candy colors.

That drawing is among a set of 500 others done by child refuges of Darfur as part of a traveling exhibition called Waging Peace.‚  The event is sponsored by Boston College’s center for Human Rights and International Justice, and the Center for the Arts and Social Responsibilities.

In 2007, Waging Peace member Anna Schmitt went to the country of Chad to learn about the living situations and humanitarian rights of Darfuri and Chadian refugees. Schmitt began collecting testimonials from adults in these areas when her focus turned to the youth, who had witnessed just as much terror as their elders. Schmitt handed out paper and pencils to kids between the ages of 6 and 18, and asked them to draw their future hopes and their strongest memories. What she found were honest depictions of the horror that these children witnessed in their everyday lives.

The government of Sudan’s story of the events that have unfolded in the past four years is not surprisingly very different from the pictures drawn by the children. What makes this exhibit fascinating is that the viewer enters with the back-of-the-mind thought that children have no reason to dramatize or fabricate their illustrations. At this age they are naƒ¯ve to the workings of politics and of government and its role in the gore and terror that they witnessed.

They just drew what they saw.

The sketches in the exhibit feature a number of elaborate events. Just as an American child might draw a scene from their home or school, the Darfuri children depict villages on fire, men on horseback shooting machine guns into crowds, and tanks and helicopters shooting into the air and dropping bombs on towns. The one common element that ties all of the drawings together is the blatant, and obvious red scribbles. Thick red smudges draw the viewer’s eye to outlines of adults, animals, and babies that lie on the floor of the representational villages, unmistakably and brutally murdered.

The images serve a duel purpose. While serving as a form of therapy for children that have obviously been emotionally scarred, the pictures also serve as an eye opener to audiences that may be unaware of the crisis that has taken over Darfur. The illustrations also provide evidence that there is much more brutality happening in Darfur than is being represented by its government. Therefore, many of the pictures will be submitted as evidence to the International Criminal Courts in the proceedings against officials of Sudan that have denied policies of genocide. The drawings certainly bring a level of awareness of the tragedy in Darfur to Boston, and shows how art therapy can be a useful tool when helping children and others deal with a crisis.

The College Art Association is expressing anger and disappointment at Brandeis University over its recent decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off its rare works to raise money for the school.

“Neither Brandeis University nor the Rose Art Museum is on the brink of economic collapse, nor are they unable to maintain the collections,” the Association said in a scathing indictment of the school. “Given that no clear explanation has been offered on the school’s financial exigencies, the closure of the Rose Art Museum and the sale of its collection appear to be in violation of professional museum standards and of academic transparency.”

The CAA cites the Codes of Ethics of the American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, “which clearly state that works of art in museum collections are held as a public trust and that any proceeds of sales must only support the acquisition of new works.”

“However, perceiving an entire art collection as a disposable financial asset and then dismantling that collection wholesale to cover other university expenses is deeply troubling for all college and university collections,” the CAA said in a statement Thursday.

The closing of the museum at Brandeis will be devastating to the academic community, not only affecting our colleagues at the museum and students and faculty in the Department of Fine Arts, which offers programs in both studio art and art history, but also depriving the entire arts-loving public in New England and around the world. The teaching of art and art history in higher education is untenable without the direct study of physical works of art, and it appears the Brandeis Board of Trustees has disregarded the kind of scholarship and creativity that have been the hallmark of CAA members for nearly one hundred years.

The College Art Association is comprised of 14,000 artists, art historians, scholars, curators, collectors, educators, art publishers, and other visual arts professionals are individual members and 2,000 universities and museums.

The association has called upon the Brandeis University board of trustees to reverse the decision.