What could be simpler than the distinction between art and design? It’s as obvious as the gap between a painting and its frame. At its best, a painting—let’s say, Georges Braque’s 1910 Cubist tour de force Violin and Candlestick, in SFMOMA—is quite literally capable of making an observer look at the world differently. The frame, while a fine piece of carpentry and gilding, simply announces the painting’s historical importance and cultural value, like a laurel on the head of a hero.The painting potentially has far greater power, but could end up in a closet. The frame, while not life changing in its own right, remains perfectly useful.

Continue to stroll through the museum’s galleries, though, and you’ll find Robert Rauschenberg’s monumental Collection of 1953–1954, newspaper fragments and stocking fabrics on painted canvas, bordered by scraps of wood integral to the fiercely abstract composition: The frame is an element of the art. Or visit the architecture and design department on the next floor, where you may find a 2001 Radiohead concert poster. It’s work for hire, but framed as smartly as any print or painting, which encourages us to pause and appreciate its undeniably graphic layout.

The poster is by San Francisco’s Rex Ray. An artist as well as a designer, he thrives on the ambiguity between the two realms, and their per-meability, working at once on canvas-mounted collages that he shows at SoMa’s Gallery 16 and on mass-produced notecards, notebooks, and wrapping paper that he publishes with Chronicle Books, which also just released a colorful monograph on his work. Ray is far from alone, and there’s good reason why work such as his is attracting interest, especially in a design stronghold like San Francisco. Arbitrary distinctions between art and design are going the way of the traditional gilded frame.

For all the creative intermingling, however, the main distinction still holds: Design serves a given function, assigned by a client, whereas art must be its own justification, instigated by the artist. It depends on the ration-ale, evident the moment you see it—as in the paintings of Amy Ellingson, who has liberated the compositional freedom of design software like Adobe Illustrator from the flat screen of the computer.

San Francisco–based Ellingson, who shows at Haines Gallery, made her reputation with long, horizontal paintings comprising visuals appropriated from advertising. Unlike the pop artists of the ’60s, she didn’t pre­sent them as the subject of her work, but rather, in the manner of Cubist collage, used iconography like the Nike Swoosh as found visual poetry to be cut and pasted—often beyond recognition—in Adobe Photoshop. These arrangements guided her hand as she meticulously transferred them onto boards using the ancient encaustic method, suspending pigments in hot wax. Encaustic is translucent, which allowed Ellingson to render almost palpable her layering of sources.

Encaustic is also the underlying medium for her current work, which she accents with oil paint. She develops her images on the computer as variations on lines and curves: She might begin with a simple arc and repeat it dozens of times, with slight differences, filling the picture plane with a grid just irregular enough that the geometry seems to breathe. Her paintings encompass many layers, each independently generated and then hand-painted, one atop another, to create optical effects more visually rich than the most advanced graphical trickery can convey.

Ellingson’s art depends on the power of graphic-design software, but the computer is only her sketchbook. These paintings are not about design any more than her previous series was about product placement. Like canvases by Jackson Pollock, her works command our attention wholly at the level of composition; they communicate nothing outside of themselves.

Such work shows how using the designer’s toolbox in unintended ways can lead to groundbreaking art. Berkeley artist Deborah Oropallo moves even further in this direction, often enlisting designer techniques and materials, including inkjet printing and silk-screening, for content and visual effect. Best known are her large, canvas-mounted mixed-media works showing colorful stacks of industrial vats beneath a mesh of delicate lace. Digitally photographed at a chemical storage plant near her home, the vats are inkjet-printed and then partly obscured by repeated silk-screening of the patterned fabric, which seems to both embellish the barrels and fence them in. The juxtaposition of these motifs transcends their origins; under their protective lace, the vats are improbably made decorative. Elements of design are used to contain their toxic menace, but the comfort is gossamer thin, encouraging concern rather than fostering confidence. Good design must be convincing. These images are not. That is what makes them effective as art.

Yet it’s perilously easy for an artist to take the rhetoric of design too far. Oropallo’s newest body of work, at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery this month, more directly confronts design, as pertains to fashion, by presenting painted portraits of women’s exotic-erotic fetish costumes overlaying traditional portraits of men. These paintings, more overtly critical than her previous series—the woman’s clothing is her identity—are themselves more akin to design. The technical execution is flawless, but the artwork seems subservient to the polemic.

Making art that directly addresses design without becoming design is one of the most difficult balances for a contemporary artist to achieve. The necessary subtlety is less likely to come from animosity than ambivalence, as in the case of Libby Black, who shows with the Heather Marx Gallery. Black re-creates whole lines of designer goods, such as Louis Vuitton handbags and Burberry blankets and Kate Spade shoes, sometimes exhibiting them in her own fabricated boutiques. Her ersatz merchandise updates pop appropriation for an era in which luxury manufacturers strive for brand recognition rivaling that of Campbell’s Soup. The origin of Black’s work is her own desire for such luxuries, mixed with discomfort about her yearning. Her crafty approach—constructing accessories from paper and hot glue and hand-painting them with logos—owes as much to childhood games of make-believe as to a sophisticated, satirical take on commercial culture. The work retains an innocence that makes her efforts appear a bit pathetic, which gives her constructions their emotional resonance as art. The unreachable material aspirations of our entire society are evoked in Black’s slightly sad and awkward objects.

Yet one also sees a sense of play, especially in her most recent work. (One of the pieces Black showed at Heather Marx last fall is on view in the “Artists of Invention” exhibition at the Oakland Museum.) Black has taken to inventing new products of her own, both outrageous (a gold-rimmed Gucci canoe) and grotesque (a Vuitton camping cot). Some items, such as a Versace ice bucket, may or may not exist outside of Black’s fantasy installations. Our uncertainty, and perhaps even our slight urge to own such a bauble, drives her humor home.

Black’s paper bags and shoes now command prices comparable to those of the leather originals, which isn’t surprising, given that art has become the ultimate high-end good. Nor is it surprising that luxury man-ufacturers are commissioning artists to create new products. For instance, Louis Vuitton recently collaborated with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, whose multimillion-dollar manga-inspired paintings are being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—with an actual Vuitton store, selling mass-produced handbags imprinted with Murakami designs for $960 apiece, built right into the exhibition space.

The shop disgruntled many critics, but their complaints missed the point. The trouble with Murakami’s Vuitton store, which was not a problem for Black’s imaginary Kate Spade boutique at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a few years ago, is that he passively decorated the handbags, rather than making anything meaningful of them. Unlike Black’s accessories, his handbags’ engagement with design was superficial.

A related problem applies to Rex Ray’s work. Produced in mixed media on canvas, his collages are large enough to occupy whole walls. After painting a foundation, often with false wood grain, he applies hundreds or thousands of ovals and circles and spokes and more elaborate shapes, all hand-cut from paper that he’s found or painted for the purpose. Ray’s compositions resemble gardens fertilized with LSD, overgrown with flowers like Ferris wheels and magical Technicolor bean stalks. The work has a nonspecific retro feel that borrows liberally from design motifs of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, fluently integrating forms and colors that would blind lesser designers. Yet these works look better in reproduction than they do on the wall. Nothing is gained by their physical presence or their scale. On the contrary, they command too much attention, sustain too little interest. The visual delight they deliver is too neat, as if they’ve been made to order for a decorator client.

Nevertheless, Ray deserves consideration, for while Black, Oropallo, and Ellingson have successfully integrated design into art, he has successfully used techniques of art to make captivating design. Casually encountered as notecards or wrapping paper, Ray’s compositions are first-rate. They can’t engage us for hours, as Ellingson’s encaustics can, but her paintings can’t reach us with the immediacy of his work. The fluidity between art and design is not the same as equivalence. But one day, someone may take a discarded bit of Ray’s wrapping paper, start cutting it up, and make great art.

Jonathon Keats is San Francisco’s art critic.