Artist: Roy De Forest
Title: Taylor Family
Size: 29.5 x 41 Inches
Medium: Acrylic, pastel, charcoal, ink, pencil and glitter on paper, in artist's frame
Edition: Original
Year: 1995
Notes: Hand Signed and Dated (Twice, Upper Center Sheet and Lower Right Mount)
Sold in the Original Artist Made Frame, As Is.
Roy De Forest arrived in San Francisco in 1950 to enroll at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). He later went on to teach at the University of California, Davis, where he dedicated nearly three decades of his career. This move to the Bay Area, far removed from the art epicenter of New York, played a significant role in shaping an artistic movement known as "funk," a term coined by Peter Selz of the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum in 1967. This aesthetic celebrated the unconventional, "lowbrow," and seemingly unsophisticated aspects of art. Notably, artists like Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson from the Chicago imagist group known as the Hairy Who, who were based in northern California between 1968 and 1970, shared this predilection for eccentricity.
Although Roy De Forest, who exhibited in New York, resisted the funk label, he did collaborate with artists like Jim Nutt at the Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, California. Inspired by Nutt's interest in self-taught art, CSFA curator Phil Linhares organized an exhibition titled "American Primitive and Naïve Art" in 1970. This exhibition helped bridge the gap between the often marginalized West Coast artistic styles, perceived as regional, and the emerging fascination with "outsider" art.
In the late 1950s, De Forest departed from the prevailing abstract expressionist style and embarked on creating narrative paintings that embraced popular and fantastical imagery. One critic likened his works to a California interpretation of Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdom" series. De Forest's paintings featured cosmological landscapes inhabited by animals with a cartoonish elasticity. Many of his artworks resembled tightly woven hallucinatory quilts with vibrant, even garish colors, disregarding conventional perspective. They were characterized by the glittering rhythm of his signature dabs of paint, often compared to candy kisses, meringue peaks, jewels, and chocolate chips. Additionally, De Forest was renowned for his painted multimedia constructions, which, unlike typical assemblage works, remained primarily focused on the two-dimensional picture plane.
Source: Brian Gross Fine Art