Segura Publishing Company--Roy DeForest

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ROY DEFOREST

History of Flight
1994 Lithograph, 42" x 60"
$2100

A Dog's Eye View of Egypt, with frame
1995 lithograph, ed. 20, 42x60"
$5500

Extract from Joshua Kind, ARTnews, September 1965

Allan Frumkin exhibited "Four California Artists"--the first appearance here of Llyn Foulkes, Roy DeForest, Joan Maffei and Robert Hudson. DeForest's carefully made constructions and paintings are close to recent Chicago practice in their sense of unfamiliar contrivance and secret whimsy; yet in contrast to the continual reference, in local art, to the human predicament which is underscored with bitter humor, DeForest's work appears cheerful and innocent. He has been influenced by Miro, but has filtered out the more acid side. Nonetheless, like the meandering sculpture of Hudson, DeForest's work exudes the sense of a thought-out and self-contained formal world.

Extract from Jerome Tarshis, ARTnews, May 1973

Roy DeForest, showing doggies and horsies at the Hansen-Fuller Gallery, paints in a style that has been around for so long that it has begun to seem new again. Or perhaps DeForest has gained a second wind, and his painting has become more vigorous than it had been over the past years.

He has kept the imagery and devices we've known: the comic-strip balloons, the dog with tongue hanging out, the box cutout framing another picture. His comic-strip imagery and brashness were related to Funk Art in the 1960s. Like Pop Art, another moribund critical category, Funk now appears to have been, for many artists, a way to go right on painting in the spirit of Abstract-Expressionism, and to shake off, at the same time, the philosophic pretensions that went with the golden age of Pollock.

For DeForest the animals and the comic-strip style have served as antidotes to the inflated critical thinking of the '40s and '50s, but the pleasure of gestural painting is still there, just as it is still there in Oldenburg. Strength without novelty is not the kind of strength a journalist is paid to find, but I also look at paintings for pleasure; these DeForests look unexpectedly good.

Extract from E.J. Montini, Arizona Republic, May 1985

On the day last week that his exhibition was to open at Marilyn Butler Fine Art in Scottsdale, artist Roy DeForest rose at 5 a.m.

His drawings were late getting to Scottsdale and only that day were being framed. Because DeForest chooses to decorate each frame himself--most often with fanciful combinations of dots and triangles and attached objects of interest--there was work to be done before the opening-night reception.

In order to see it through, DeForest spent the day in the framer's workshop, painting frames as they were completed and letting the desert heat contribute to speedy drying.

"I was happy with the way things turned out," he said. "Of course, I would rather have things all done on schedule, but I think you have to be ingenious. It is part of the profession. It makes things fun.

"The idea of being spontaneous, of dealing with a situation as it comes up, is probably the only thing I retained from abstract expressionism. It is like being a jazz drummer. You learn to improvise."

The frames were wet for the opening, a circumstance that might have gone unnoticed if DeForest's last-minute exploits had not been part of the cocktail chatter, adding an Arizona anecdote to the artist's California-based reputation.

"Art is about variation," DeForest said. "It is like music. Bach knew how to work with variables. So do good artists. What makes art different is not its complexity, but its simplicity. You really don't have many options, and so you learn to use variations as you go along."

At 54, DeForest is one of the West Coast's most prominent artists. He is most often associated with a group of San Francisco painters and sculptors that includes Robert Arneson, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley.

Though differing stylistically, the members of the group shared an attitude, a kind of disdain for the conventions of art and the business of art. And they succeeded anyway. They were lumped into a school of thought variously described as "funk", "dirty" or "bad" art, which actually meant good art.

Or something like that.

For whatever reasons, the art caught on, and DeForest, who worked as a professor of at the University of California at Davis for 17 years, was able to quit and devote himself fully to making art.

"It's not that teaching isn't an honorable profession, but I think that within three days after I quit, that whole part of my life was gone," DeForest said. "Of course, working full time at art doesn't mean that you produce a canvas every six months and have all these beautiful models hanging around. It is a lot like going to work in a brick factory. You have to work. It is just that it is a more pleasant activity."

DeForest lives in Port Costa, California, north of Berkeley, with his wife, Gloria, their children and several dogs. The latter figure prominently in the artist's work are known not as pets but as models.

He is a small man, disheveled, with curly hair and a beard. He possesses the clear, flashing eyes of a rascal, which in art circles, he is.

"Sometimes you wonder about what it is your work says to people that they respond to," he said during an interview at the university print facility. "I suppose you just have to have faith that if you have an idea and pursue it, that there will eventually be a limited audience for your work.

"I don't think there is more an artist can hope for--to find an audience, however small. Lots of important artists have had very small audiences in their lifetimes. My own success has always come as a pleasant surprise to me."

Pleasant surprises are at the heart of all that DeForest paints and draws. His work is a contradiction on canvas--serious in its construction and technique, humorous (sometimes silly) in its subject matter and message.

"Of course I want people to have fun with the work," he said. "But that is because I have to have fun in order to make it. Otherwise it would be too boring.

"But humor can be serious business. I think Miro said something like, 'If I thought too much about the content of the work, it would go away.' I feel like that. I don't overanalyze the work. After all, it is quite possible I am doing something that has nothing to do with what I think I am doing. History is replete with such artists."

More than anything else, DeForest appears to be an artist doing exactly what he wants. He will teach a short semester this summer in Maine, a place he said he often was wanted to visit for a summer, and then will return to California in order to enter what he calls "the art wars".

"I've been making art for about half my life, and there is no way I could do it if I wasn't constantly involved in some form of change," DeForest said. "And you can't worry about the audience. I think of it this way: If you can't entertain yourself, how can you expect to entertain anyone else?"