This year’s East Bay Artist’s Exhibition is largely an assembly of artists who manipulate a great variety of devices and design layouts more customarily seen in the applied arts. It is curious that much second-rate painting does not imitate fine art, but rather picks up weak features from commercial art.

Those who have not settled for contrivances are the best in the show, although their work is, on the whole, mediocre. Henrietta Berk’s landscape is possibly the nicest piece in the show. In this canvas she has handled color with a great deal of sensitivity, but the structure of her painting was