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Fantasy Art Now

        West Coast Artist Roy De Forest has long worked with the theme of rambling visual storytelling about journeys to fantastic places where inhabitants and travelers include adept, grinning canines with glowing, bas-relief eyes.
        De Forest was born on 11 February 1930 in North Platte, Nebraska and grew up on a farm. After living in Yakima, Washington, he came to California in 1950 to study at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where his teachers included Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park. He went on the study at San Francisco State College and in the late 50s began to teach. In the 60s De Forest was one of a group of the artists called themselves Funk Artists.

Roy DeForest

De Forest along with Robert Arnesan, Peter Saul, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley established a refuge of eccentric and humorous figurative art in the midst of the formalism and abstraction of the American art establishment. his paintings evolved to vibrantly patterned, fanciful landscapes crowded with animal and human figures.
        Paul Dorn wrote in 2002,"Roy De Forest has always been a difficult artist to categorize. Known for his phantasmagorically chaotic images of cartoonish figures and cheerfully loony canines, rendered with a distinctive "paint drop kiss" technique, De Forest is generally lumped in with the Bay Area Funk artists of the 1960s. Like East Coast Pop Art, California's Funk movement was a response to the oppressive gospel of abstract expressionism that dominated the aesthetic canon and art schools of post-WWII America. With a delightful lack of self-importance, Funk provided a welcome niche for iconoclastic figures such as De Forest." While teaching at the University of California at Davis from 1965-1982 , he and his fellow professors Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley and Manuel Neri elevated the art school to national prominence and influence.
        De Forest's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and many others.

 

 


 
 
 

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