See also: De Forest Discusses His Art (Quicktime, 29 min 27 sec)
Price Amerson, executive producer, John Reed, director, Copyright 1980 UC Regents
Where to see De Forest
Whether at the UC Davis campus, significant California art museums or private galleries, De Forest's art is available for viewing. [ more… ]
Renowned teacher and artist De Forest used whimsy to plumb the profound
Roy De Forest had two messages for his students: Don't take yourself too seriously. Create art that makes you happy.
De Forest, a nationally renowned artist and member of the UC Davis art department for nearly 30 years, died May 18 at a Vallejo hospital following a brief illness. He was 77.
"I keep telling my students to take themselves less academically seriously," he said in a film made in 1980 as part of an oral history project of the Department of Art and Art History [link to] (see video). "… I always tell students to sit down and do what really interests them."
Born into a Nebraska farmworker family during the Great Depression, De Forest followed that advice to become one of the most important artists of his generation.
He was part of a Northern California art movement once described by Washington Post art reviewer Sidney Lawrence as a style "in which counterculture thinking fused with an anything-goes, anti-art attitude harking back to the Dadaists of the World War I era."
‘I think of myself as kind of a modified, parochial, latter-day American French artist.’
Roy De Forest, UC Davis art professor emeritus
Disliked the 'California funk' label
The style, marked by exuberant, outrageous wit, was sometimes called "California funk," a classification De Forest disliked.
"I do not want to be thought of as a member of a school, a leader of an academy, a member of a rational and corporate order or poetic or intellectual cadre," he said in the UC Davis film, which features dozens of his paintings from private and public collections, including those of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"I'm basically a kind of soup maker. I've no particular interest in being pure … I think of myself as kind of a modified, parochial, latter-day American French artist."
De Forest's work was exhibited throughout the United States, most prominently at a Roy De Forest Retrospective that opened in 1974 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and then moved in 1975 to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Every Trapper Should Have An Indian Dog, Painting, 67" x 69 1/2" (image), 1960
'A sardonic Americana'
In a May 23 obituary in the New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith characterized De Forest's body of work as "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 Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and other major newspapers also published obituaries honoring De Forest.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Mary Rourke noted that De Forest was on the UC Davis art department faculty at the same time as Robert Arneson, William Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud and other major artists who "contributed to the art department's stellar reputation."
During their tenure, those artists helped transform the program into one of the most competitive in the country, receiving some 350 applications each year for nine or 10 spots in the graduate program.
Ecology, Drawing, 22" x 29 7/8" (image/sheet), 1968
30-40 applicants per opening
Today, the faculty continues to turn away 30 or 40 applicants for every student it accepts, and is home to such critically acclaimed artists as David Hollowell, Malaquias Montoya, Robin Hill and department chair Lucy Puls. Manuel Neri, Roland Peterson and Thiebaud remain on the emeriti faculty.
De Forest was born in 1930 in North Platte, Neb., the son of migrant farm workers. He grew up in Nebraska, Colorado and eastern Washington state.
He received an associate degree in math and humanities from Yakima Junior College in Yakima, Wash., in 1950, and spent the next decade studying art.
He attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in art at San Francisco State University.
‘In his art and his teaching, he was able to say things that were very, very difficult in ways that people could hear and accept and learn from.’
Harvey Himmelfarb, art professor emeritus
Tried to be a 'serious' abstract expressionist
In the UC Davis film, De Forest, seated on a couch between two sleeping dogs, said he tried as an art student to be a "serious" abstract expressionist, but decided his attempts were "completely pompous."
He chose instead to focus on art that gave him a "tangible kind of enjoyment, just out of the act of doing it," he said in the film. "… Nothing is worse than total seriousness."
By 1965, when he joined UC Davis as a lecturer, De Forest had established a national reputation as a painter and sculptor. He became an assistant professor in 1967, rose to full professor in 1974 and remained on the full-time faculty until the summer of 1982.
He continued teaching part-time until December 1992, when he retired with a title of professor emeritus.
Buy hamburgers, swipe an idea…
Teaching, he said sardonically in the film, made three things possible: "It enables you to buy hamburgers, and, once in a while, swipe a student's idea … it also fixes it so you can do less painting than you would do otherwise."
Turning serious, De Forest said teaching also provided a context for ideas and contact with many people.
"It's nice, honest work," he said in the film.
Thiebaud, a professor emeritus at UC Davis, recalled his longtime friend and colleague as a man "with a good and great sense of irony. He was not interested in any kind of preciousness, prestige or any of that nonsense.
"He pursued his work with real genuineness, regardless of what others thought."
Untitled, Print, 23" x 31" (image), 1975
An exceptional teacher
Retired professor Harvey Himmelfarb, who chaired the art department in the mid-'80s, said the qualities that made De Forest an exceptional artist were the same as those that made him an exceptional teacher:
"In his art and his teaching, he was able to say things that were very, very difficult in ways that people could hear and accept and learn from. He was full of whimsy, and at the same time he was profound. He was funny, and at the same time he was deadly serious. He was quite an extraordinary human being."
One of De Forest's former students, Jock Reynolds, now director of the Yale University Art Gallery, remembers how well the art faculty worked together.
"Roy and all the Davis painters were just amazingly generous with their time and available to meet with us students and to encourage us," Reynolds said. "Their sense of collegiality was something for us to model moving forward in life."
Fiercely independent spirit
De Forest also had a fiercely independent spirit, said George Adams, owner of the George Adams Gallery in New York, which represented the artist. "That spirit should remain a lesson to the younger art world," Adams said.
"Roy always went his own way. He never looked over his shoulder to see what someone else was doing. He never did anything like anybody else."
Prominent American sculptor John Buck, a student and longtime friend of De Forest, called the artist "the champion of imagination."
"He will continue to influence painting and sculpture in my work and others' for years to come," Buck said. "He was the king of his own vision, the 'Great Dingo,' and the one who loved us, as a teacher and a friend."
Lived in Port Costa
On the home page: A detail from Roy De Forest's Dog Cart From Hell, a painting that can be found in Shields Library on the UC Davis campus.
De Forest and his wife, Gloria, lived in the small Contra Costa County town of Port Costa, on land populated by cattle, birds and the dogs that inspired so much of his art.
In recent years, the couple visited Patagonia, Mexico, Hawaii, Australia and New Mexico. Realizing a lifelong ambition, De Forest in 2004 traveled down the Amazon.
In addition to his wife, De Forest is survived by a daughter, Oriana, and a son, Pascal, both of Concord, Calif., and his sisters, Beth Jacobs of San Leandro, Beverly Lagiss of Livermore and Lynn Robie of Sacramento.
The family requests that remembrances be directed to the UC Davis Foundation/Roy De Forest Memorial Fund, Department of Art, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, Calif., 95616; or to the art program at The Center for Adaptive Learning, 3227 Clayton Road, Concord, Calif., 94519.