Roy De Forest

Roy De Forest (11 February 1930 – 18 May 2007) was an American painter, sculptor, and teacher.

He was involved in both the Funk art and Nut art movements in the Bay Area of California.

De Forest's art is known for its quirky and comical fantasy lands filled with bright colors and creatures, most commonly dogs.

Roy De Forest was born in North Platte, Nebraska, to migrant farm workers during the Great Depression.

De Forest's family lost their farm in Nebraska due to the harsh economic conditions during the Great Depression and were forced to move to Yakima, Washington.

In Yakima, the De Forests bought a new farm, where they harvested pears and plums.

De Forest described the socioeconomic status of his family as "not well off."

Farm life had an important impact on De Forest's art.

In his early art, De Forest experimented with landscape, which was inspired by the open land of his farm.

Later in his career, De Forest began painting animals and other fantasy creatures in his art, which was inspired by growing up around farm animals.

De Forest attended Yakima Junior College, where his interest in art and art history developed.

He initially was an engineering major, but soon realized that art came more naturally to him.

In 1950 he moved to California to study at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) on scholarship, where he earned a bachelor's degree (1953).

De Forest's first exhibition was in 1955, and the work reflected the influence of Abstract Expressionism, along with a developing interest in assemblage.

After serving in the US Army as a sign painter, De Forest went on to earn his master's degree (1958) at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).

After graduating from San Francisco State University, De Forest got his first teaching job at Yakima Junior College and spent two years teaching there.

After this, he moved around from job to job for a short period of time, teaching children's classes in Oakland, California.

He also taught night classes at the Bay Area prison, San Quentin.

Here, he worked in the Adjustment Center, which later became death row.

De Forest described his time teaching in San Quentin as extremely interesting and greatly influential on his teaching.

Beginning in 1960 and continuing throughout the decade De Forest had many one-person shows at San Francisco's Dilexi Gallery, operated by Jim Newman.

During the 1960s, U.C. Davis became a hub for the Funk art movement, with many of the artists associated with this movement either teaching at Davis, or having studied there.

De Forest, along with Arneson, Wiley, and David Gilhooly often exhibited together under this heading, including semi-regular shows at the Candy Store Gallery in nearby Folsom, California.

Another important figure in the Funk art movement was Clayton Bailey, who was De Forest's neighbor, friend, and collaborator.

De Forest, along with Bailey, was also a key figure in the development of Nut art, a new artistic genre that paralleled Funk art, and which flourished primarily in the late 1960s and early 1970s in northern California.

De Forest preferred the term 'Nut' over 'Funk' to describe his art.

A, perhaps apocryphal, account of the origin of the movement's name exists in an unpublished manuscript titled Basic Art written by self-appointed "Nut chronicler," David Zack.

De Forest claims that "the aspect of invention in painting is the major factor in what you would call my style of painting."

De Forest rejected traditional styles of painting claiming that "rather than, say, taking an image and then finding a way to express it in paint, sometimes I think about how to use a paint and then find an image that fits it."

De Forest's style depicts journeys to fantasy lands filled with creatures, some familiar, some not.

These lands were quirky, comical, and crowded, filled with texturized, Hallucinogen colors.

He describes himself as an "obscure visual constructor of mechanical delights."

De Forest believed in having a great amount of variety in paintings.

De Forest started working for a young University of California, Davis (U.C. Davis) Art Department in 1965.

He was originally hired as a lecturer but worked his way up to assistant professor and eventually full professor in 1974.

At U.C. Davis, De Forest worked with fellow artists Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley.

Notable students of De Forest included painter Christopher Brown.

De Forest taught at UC Davis for twenty-seven years before retiring in 1992.

On the occasion of the exhibit, You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Art Faculty, Renny Pritikin of the Nelson Gallery said, "History was made in the Central Valley in the early '60s when five great artists came together on the same faculty for over a decade and changed the nature and perception of art in California forever."

He continued to submit paintings and other forms of art in exhibitions for over fifty years until his death in 2007.