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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
Composition with Figures
Art © Estate of Roy De Forest/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Biography from Carlson Gallery:
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Forest studied at the California School of Fine Arts, 1950-1952 and the
San Francisco State College, B.A. 1953, M.A. 1958. Taught at Yakima
Junior College, Washington, 1958-1960; Contra Costa Junior College, San
Pablo, 1960-1961; San Francisco State, 1961-1962; California College of
Arts and Crafts, 1964-1965; and the University of California, Davis
since 1965. In 1972, De Forest received a National Endowment for the
Arts Award.
Solo Exhibitions: East & West Gallery, San
Francisco, 1955,1958; Stone Court Gallery, Yakima, Washington, 1959,
1960; Dilexi Gallery, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1967; Allan Frumkin
Gallery, New York; San Francisco Art Institute, 1969; 1972; California
Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1971; Retrospective, San Francisco
Museum of Art; Fort Worth Art Center; Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1974-1975.
Selected Group Exhibitions:
California School of Fine Arts, Roy DeForest, Relf Case, Richard
Brodney and Bart Perry, (1952); 72nd Annual Painting and Sculpture
Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco
Museum of Art, 1953; 73rd Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of
the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art,
1954; PACIFIC COAST ART, IIIrd Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1955;
76th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art
Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1957; 77th Annual
Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association
at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1958; 79th Annual Painting
Exhibition of the San
Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco
Museum of Art, 1960; Eightieth Annual Painting Exhibition of the San
Francisco Art Institute (Formerly the San Francisco Art Association) at
the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1961; Fifty California Artists,
Whitney Museum of Art 1962; Winter Invitational, California Palace of
The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1962, 63, 64; The Art Bank of the
San Francisco Art Association, 1962, 63, 64, 66; San Francisco Museum
of Art, Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era 1976
Public
Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Whitney Museum of American Art,
NYC; The Oakland Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Literature:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Painting & Sculpture
Collection; Catalog of The Oakland Museum; Thomas Albright, Art in the
San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980; Henry Hopkins, Art in the San
Francisco Bay Area, The Modern Era; many others.
Source:
David
J Carlson, Carlson Gallery, California. Carlson's specialty is
Post-World War II California artists, and he is preparing a catalogue
for a 2004 traveling exhibition of these artists to several California
museums.
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Biography from Sheldon Museum of Art:
| Roy De Forest became a painter of work not easily categorized because
of his independent approach to the profession. He has evolved
through several styles from abstraction to funk to realism with
subjects ranging from non-objective to realistic animals. His early work was comprised of larger,
overlapping, amorphous shapes in bright colors with detailed patterns
within.
However, a consistent philosophy for his mature work has been
irreverence for academic convention and a joy in being creative and
finding his own way. In his paintings, he expresses a personal
pleasure in how own fantasies from which he constructs "hypothetical
beings, situations and worlds". The intent is to "preserve this
possible world, with all its animals and creatures, for my own private
viewing, fun and enjoyment."
Roy De Forest was born in North Platte, Nebraska in 1930, but was
raised from the time he was in the third grade
in Yakima, Washington Central Washington where he enrolled in 1948 in
Yakima Junior College as an engineering major. However, he turned
away from his original intent, realizing his talents were much more
oriented towards art.
In 1950, he relocated to San Francisco to attend the California School
of
Fine Arts from 1950-1952. At that school, he was exposed to a
variety of influences, especially Abstract Expressionism and Bay Area
Figurative. Visiting artists and faculty members included
Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Elmer Bischoff, David Park,
Hassel Smith and Ansel Adams. Among his peers as students were
Joan Broan, Deborah Remington, Richard Diebenkorn and Frank
Lobdell.
Of special influence was Clyfford Still, who had a charismatic
personality and who advocated freedom and independence in painting
underpinned by intellectuality. According to De Forest, Still
said: "I do not want students to imitate my work but only my example of
freedom and independence from all external, decadent and corrupting
influences." Another strong influence on De Forest was Hassel Smith,
who advocated that a painter was a philosopher whose expression
required thinking---much more than just sheer emotion as advocated by
the Abstract Expressionists.
From these experiences plus many other considerations, De Forest
developed his own ideas, which eventually much deviated from Still and
the regarding of art as a kind of religion that involved truth,
romanticism and conversion---the saving of souls. He also
rebelled by giving up the thick application of oil, a painterly method
so prevalent among Still and his followers. Instead De Forest
developed his surfaces with thin paint, often applied as small dots to
saturate the surface. Another rebellion was using bright colors
and humor including mixed-media found objects, a real 'no no' at the
California School where painting was regarded as 'all serious'.
In 1953, De Forest earned a bachelor's degree from San Francisco State
College, and then served two years in the army. He also began
exhibiting his work in a number of venues in the Bay Area including a
one-person show at the East and West Gallery. Five years later,
he earned a Master's Degree and a teaching certificate from San
Francisco State College. He became increasingly interested in a
wide variety of artists including Piet Mondrian and his optimism and
more traditional sources of American art such as George Caleb
Bingham and Edward Hicks. From familiarity with these and
other artists, he said: "I realized that the idea that Abstract
Expressionism was the first great American tradition was hogwash."
In 1958, he took a teaching job at Yakima Junior College, and began
doing what he regarded as some of his first signature painting, many of
them landscapes executed with the viewer perspective of seeing them
from an airplane. In the 1960s, he began adding figures to his
landscapes---all the time experimenting with perspective and utilizing
elements of both abstraction and realism. Later he incorporated
animals, which eventually became the "main characters" in his
paintings. He said his dog imagery derives in part from "my
search for a new way to approach the figurative tradition." In
other words, it was the application of the figurative tradition to
animals.
From 1962 to 1982, De Forest was a professor of art at the University
of California at Davis, and his colleagues included Wayne Thiebaud,
Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley. Each of these artists was
independent and achieved strong reputations, which much enhanced Davis
as an art school. However, some critics tried to lump them
together stylistically, which is an inacuracy. And certainly some
of the most accurate ongoing descriptions of De Forest are the words
'Independent' and 'Unique'. Of his work, Henry Hopkins, Director
of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said: "De Forest is
his own painter; that subject matter, that method of painting---that's
not anybody's school."
Source:
Patricia Failing, "Roy De Forest's Dog Poetry", ARTnews, April 1984, pp. 56-63
Courtesy, Rhonda Seacrest, President of the Nebraska Art Association, Sheldon Memorial Gallery, Lincoln.
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Roy De Forest is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
California Painters
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