Mr. Benton exhibits portraits of some of his colleagues in the community of Bay Area artists, including James Monte, William Morehouse, Walter Snelgrove, Bryan Wilson, and others. These life-size full-figure portrayals in oil are executed in a broad, casual manner. Usually the object of this type of informal portraiture is to suppress detail and to select and dramatize essential individual characteristics. In the group here, however, an overall monotony of subdued palette and tense, somber facial and postural expressions gives the impression that many of the artists who sat for these portrayals resemble one another a good deal more than they actually do. Mr. Bryan Wilson (the only endomorph in the group) stands out from the general homogeneity with a bright blue shirt, and a background appropriately paraphrasing the ornithological motifs of his own work.

—Palmer D. French