California Funk
MAY 22, 2007 TAGS:
Roy De Forest was a bay-area painter whose individualistic style was at home both in the counterculture movement of 1960s and in academia.
De Forest died on May 18 in San Francisco. He was a professor at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and at the University of California, Davis. His work was wondrously colorful, depicting space in a pre-pictorial "anti-art" fashion.
Roberta Smith of The New York Times described his style 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 dots developed into coarse pointillism, becoming something of a trademark; the little dollops of paint resembled chocolate chips (or for some, LSD tabs)."
The "California Funk" art scene was an ill-fitting label applied to a group of Bay-area artists in the 1960s whose highly subjective paintings were difficult to categorize.
Obit from The New York Times
UC Davis obit
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