
California College of Arts and Crafts Outdoor Art Fair
Lyttoh Savings and Loan Association, Oakland
A few mature artists who have exhibited publicly and are only nominally students are noticeable in what is, on the whole, an insipid student show. Dicren Injeyan has a comic sense of reality that enables him to make light of his morbid format. Injeyan mashes together parts of the body and a kind of circus symbolism to expose a startling scatological outlook. The localized image is affixed in a brightly colored field and bordered on the bottom by meaningless noise-words (e.g., “peeppeeppeepe”). His work is tunny, vicious and sardonic, but not depraved. His color range is still a bit weak and seems to vacillate between improbable garishness and close resemblance to living matter. Moreover, he does not always keep his distance from his subject and occasionally turns out childish work. At his sophisticated best Injeyan is a truly savage wit.
Richard Crawford’s “P.V.A.,” (which won first prize) is a black and white painting that looks more like a magnified pencil drawing than a canvas. Crawford juxtaposes head-motifs stenciled across the top and bottom of the painting with a huge band-aid placed in its center. Within a seemingly arid format Crawford has created a disturbingly evocative study of the relationship of trivia to the human. He apparently has no interest in the formal problems of painting and prefers to call upon his graphic skill for insights. His one-sideedness makes this work visually exciting.
Both Judy and Philip Linhares exhibit good drawings, but Judy’s “I Met Him On A Monday . . .,” which contains two crudely-crayoned figures surmounted by a cloud, is the best in the show.

