Roy De Forest

De Forest participated in the Beat culture of San Francisco in the 1950s, but is best known as part of a group of irreverent Bay Area artists who taught at the University of California, Davis beginning in the 1960s. Like his colleagues William T. Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Arneson, De Forest developed an idiosyncratic style and repertoire of motifs. Rejecting the orthodoxies of Abstract Expressionism as a student in the 1950s, he developed a bold, colorful painting style that was inspired by folk art, Northwest Coast Native American art, Australian Aboriginal bark painting, scientific diagrams, pulp fiction, and cartoons, alongside the work of figures like Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miro. De Forest was a child of the Depression, born in 1930 in North Platte, Nebraska to tenant farmers. His rural upbringing acquainted him with a variety of animals, but the family's succession of dogs had the biggest impact, becoming a major motif of his work beginning in the late 1960s. Like legions of Midwesterners, De Forest's family migrated west, eventually settling in Yakima Valley, Washington. Journeys-both those he experienced and those he read about as a boy-fired his imagination for years to come. His handling of space has been referred to as "crazy quilt" for its collage-like juxtaposition of patterns, forms, materials, and techniques.
Drawing was a crucial component of De Forest's creative process. He considered his works on paper to be as important as his paintings. During a family vacation in Yosemite National Park in the summer of 1987, De Forest made a series of pastel-and-airbrush drawings (including the present one), published the following year as an accordion-fold book by Bedford Arts, Publishers. It was the first in a series of artist books published by the press. Instead of straightforwardly representing Yosemite, the drawings depict a landscape that De Forest described as an amalgam of places where he had been, including Montana and Baja, California.
The twenty-four panels of the accordion-fold book suggest a sequential, if indecipherable, narrative. The bearded man who appears on the cover and wandering within the book is an avatar of the artist himself. Many of De Forest's favored motifs appear in the drawings: dogs, boats, and-typical of his later work-representations of the devil and the mythical Bigfoot, as well as Native American figures, which relate to his close connection to the Yakama Nation, whose struggles he witnessed as a young man. De Forest, who was reluctant to interpret his work, wrote, "This Pictorial Journey records an amazing adventure. The renowned grey-haired sage and his loyal companion, a spotted, red-faced sheep dog travel to the previously unknown 'Great Canine Mountains,' and through 'Terrier Pass' to the unexplored lands beyond."