An extremely funny 15-minute film, may be taken as a solemn leg-pull of the recent vogue for dribble-and-splotch painters, those athletic canvas-coverers whose style owes less to Van Gogh's brush technique than to Stan Laurel's custard pie stance.

The film, a first-time effort by three ex-admen, begins with a loving shot of wharfs, fishing shacks and sounding sea-the sort of vista once sketched avidly by artists and now appreciated chiefly by retired couples who tour Cape Cod in late September.

The artist is a burly fellow (Ezra Reuben Baker), recognizably aesthetic in paint-smeared dungarees, scurrilous red sweater and combat boots.

He trundles a cart filled with paint buckets along a dock, then throws an enormous sheet of wallboard down on a mud flat ten feet below.

A hilarious good - natured spoof of abstract-expressionist painting has been made the subject of a colored film-short called "Day of the Painter."

His "Wall Street Journal" is delivered by boat, and, having ascertained that his investments are doing well, he loads a wheelbarrow with assorted cans of paint, long sticks, and a spray gun, has two helpers carry his enormous blank canvas, and sets off to his muddy "studio" by the side of the stream.