PAINTER'S LUCK

SOME painters have all the luck. They get paid for doing what tourists pay through the nose to do: seeing and remembering new things. Painter Robert Sivard, 40, has a blockful of Paris shops and people firmly on canvas as well as in memory; his pictures, which went on view this week at Manhattan's Midtown Gallery, are the sort any armchair tourist can enjoy.

The head-on directness of Sivard's paintings (opposite), their flatness and deliberately stiff drawing, result in a naive, pseudoprimitive air. But Sivard is no primitive, as his clear, soft colors, neat compositions and elaborate use of textures demonstrate. He found what he saw charming, set out to communicate, in a quiet way, the charm he felt. Even Paris recognized its own reflection in Sivard's little mirrors. When his pictures were first shown abroad, the Paris paper Combat exulted: "What joy ... to find works like these."

Sivard was raised in The Bronx and Long Island, trained as a commercial illustrator. He has worked for magazines and advertising agencies, is now a consultant with the U.S. Information Agency in Washington. A lean and sober-seeming man, he views the world through thick, tortoise-shell spectacles and finds it full of pleasant humor. If his spectacles have a rosy tinge, so do his canvases, which sparkle with the refreshing tingle of a spring day in Paris.

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