By Guy D. Garcia

Two years ago, when he was a second-grader at Our Lady of Perpetual Help parochial school in Queens, N.Y., Danny LaBoccetta was asked by his art teacher to draw something Christmassy for a national postage-stamp contest. LaBoccetta, now 9, obligingly produced a red-cheeked, smiling Santa and then forgot about it. But his Santa was chosen from 500,000 entries, and last week it appeared on a new 1984 Christmas stamp. "I feel real happy, it's an honor," says the lad who had to interrupt his Halloween to sign autographs. Success has not spoiled the young artist, but time has inevitably made him a little wiser. Asked about Santa's reaction to seeing his stamp arrive at the North Pole, LaBoccetta replied, "Why, I don't believe in Santa Claus any more."

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Perhaps the dispute over the war's monument at least will be put to rest. When Designer Maya Ying Lin's Viet Nam Memorial was unveiled in 1982, few denied the power of the low, somber black granite wall, now engraved with the names of 58,007 Americans dead or missing in the war. Nonetheless, many veterans felt that the wall was not uplifting, not heroic enough. So officials of the memorial fund risked the wrath of those who liked the wall as it was and asked Frederick Hart, 40, a Washington sculptor who had finished third in the initial competition, to design an added element. Last week his statue of seven-foot-tall bronze figures was set in place opposite the wall to await a formal unveiling on Nov. 9. Hart depicts three typical fighting men "gazing at a vision of war, its loss, its enormity . . . peering into our own eternity, perhaps even searching for their names on the wall." Those who have seen it believe that all sides will be more than satisfied.

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She is "very, very bad" at drawing and says that "talent, unfortunately, is not hereditary." Nevertheless, Sophie Renoir, 20, a great-granddaughter of French Impressionist Painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, is determined to express herself. Her chosen medium is film acting (well, her great-uncle is Film Maker Jean Renoir), and her credits include The Children Are Watching, with French Heartthrob Alain Delon and a planned film this spring with Burt Lancaster. Renoir just visited New York City to preview a limited edition of 318 bronzes (initial asking price: $15,000 each) that went on sale last week after being cast from great-granddad's newly found terra-cotta bas-relief Woman with Tambourine HI. It is the final sculpture he is known to have done before his death in 1919. Renoir, who does not want to emulate the half-dressed woman posing in the bronzes, limits her movie roles to those that do not call for nudity. In France, she notes, wryly, "there aren't many films like that around."

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He left his imprint on history in 1969 when he became the fourth man to set foot on the moon, and now former Astronaut Alan Bean, 52, is painting almost obsessively in an effort to capture the lunar landscape on canvas. In Houston this month Bean will launch his second one-man show with 15 of his $7,500 acrylic moonscapes. "Frederic Remington and Charles Russell painted the West as it was before it went away forever," he says. "That's kind of what I'm doing. The beginning of the space program will never come again." Bean, who retired as NASA'S chief of astronaut operations and training three years ago, would like to make a return trip to space, but not as an astronaut. Says he: "I would love to go back as an artist." --By Guy D. Garcia