Roy De Forest, Painter Of Colorful Comic Scenes, 77

[DGH]

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Roy De Forest, 77, Painter of Colorful, Comic Scenes, Dies

By ROBERTA SMITH [New York Times]

Roy De Forest, a Bay Area [San Francisco, California] artist whose
paintings depicted a comical, crowded frontier land of people and
animals in patchworks of scorched, textured color, died on Friday [May
18, 2007] in Vallejo, California. He was 77 and lived in nearby Port
Costa [California].

His death was confirmed by George Adams, his New York [New York]
dealer, who said the cause had not been determined.

Mr. De Forest belonged to a group of Bay Area individualists who
included Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, William T. Wiley and Peter Saul.
They were often grouped under the heading of Funk, a term Mr. De
Forest disliked; the New York art world tended to lump them together
as regionalists.

Most were versed in Abstract Expressionism but gradually turned its
formal lessons to narrative, nonabstract ends. Mr. De Forest's
abstractions morphed into crusty maplike expanses teeming with odd
textures, cartoon details, little folk-art silhouettes and swarming
dots.

He was a lover of dogs, rarely owning fewer than two. By the mid-1960s
he had developed a sardonic Americana of guys and dogs, overlapping
with other animals, birds and sometimes imaginary beings in flattened
landscapes, whose hallucinatory colors and a down-home woodsiness
presaged the nascent counterculture. The dots developed into coarse
pointillism, becoming something of a trademark; the little dollops of
paint resembled chocolate chips (or for some, LSD tabs).

The son of migrant farm workers, Mr. De Forest was born in North
Platte, Neb., in 1930 and grew up mostly in Yakima, Washington, where
he attended junior college. He studied on a scholarship at the San
Francisco Art Institute, where his teachers included the prominent
local artists Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park, and later
earned bachelor's and master's degrees from San Francisco State
College. He taught at the University of California, Davis, from 1965
to 1992.

He is survived by his wife, Gloria; a daughter, Oriana, and a son,
Pascal, both of Concord, California; and three sisters, also of
California: Beth Jacobs of San Leandro [California], Beverly Lagiss of
Livermore and Lynn Robie of Sacramento [California].

His first solo show was at the East & West Gallery in San Francisco in
1955. Starting in 1966, he exhibited regularly at the Allan Frumkin
Gallery in New York. A retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art came to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975.

In that show's catalog, Mr. De Forest identified himself as an
"obscure visual constructor of mechanical delights" and quoted a
talking dog, named Samuel Johnson, who said, "What is current taste
but old desires made palatable by present boredom."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/obituaries/23deforest.html?ref=obituaries