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Roy De Forest 1930-2007

Goodbye to the Johnny Appleseed of Sacto Funk

By Tim Foster

[[image]] Untitled, sculpture frame, mixed media on paper, 2003.[[/image]]

A few weeks ago I began writing an article about Roy De Forest because he had a current show at the Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento and was scheduled to speak there on June 7. I wanted to make sure that art fans in Sacramento knew about the opportunity to hear the incredibly influential area artist speak about his work; De Forest died on May 18, so we've all missed the chance. The show (shared with longtime Sacramento artist and retired Sac State professor Gerald Walburg) runs through June and offers a chance to see the final show of De Forest's lifetime.

Roy De Forest was a familiar figure in the Sacramento art scene, less for his personal presence (he lived in Port Costa) than for his influence. In a quarter-century of teaching at UC, Davis, De Forest influenced several generations of Sacramento-area artists. He, along with fellow UCD funkist Robert Arneson, established a heavy tradition of funk art here that is plain to anyone who pays any attention to local art.

Love it or hate it, funk art is a mainstay of the Sacramento art scene. in fact, funk is the bookend to the other dominant style in sac art: the faux Thiebaud. Take these two categories out of Sacto art and you'll have a lot of empty galleries. It's largely proximity, of course. Funk art, though not born in the bay area, peaked there, beginning with the Berkeley Museum's seminal show Funk in 1967. Roy De Forest exhibited at that show, along with Arneson, William Wiley and Davi Gilhooley, making for a strong UCD contingent.

From the first funk art was attacked from both sides of the art divide. The cultural elite that championed the abstract expressionists and other nonrepresentational art wanted nothing to do with it, and "traditional" artists were horrified, even angry. Painter, and future Juxtapoz publisher Robert Williams vividly recounted his first encounter with funk (Ed Kienholz' pioneering 1964 masterwork Back Seat Dodge '38) with a mixture of rage and disgust. Perhaps the height of the furor over funk was reached when Arneson's commissioned portrait of assassinated mayo George Moscone was rejected by the San Francisco Art Commission.

Looking at Roy De Forest's work, one is hard pressed to find anything to be angry about.

Determinedly naive, De Forest's art achieves an almost childlike joy. Simple cartoon figures and faces, and dogs - dogs everywhere - on garishly colored backgrounds dominate the work in the show. De Forest's work riffs on outsider art without becoming outsider art. In this the work is reminiscent of Philip Guston who adopted a ham-fisted cartoonists' vocabulary and adapted it to his own themes. Unlike Guston, and unlike Kienholtz [[Kienholz]] or Arneson, De Forest's social comment is hidden, if there at all. De Forest created vivid fantasy worlds, extending their reach even into the elaborate frames he constructed to bridge the gap between this world and his own.

De Forest has been described as an uncategorizable artist. While I'm not sure that many truly interesting artists are categorizable, the funk label actually seems to fit De Forest's art pretty well. Bright, silly, charming and homebrew, De Forest's paintings, prints and constructions look 'funky'.

His influence on Sacramento's art scene is unmeasurable. From the funk bonanza that is the Second Saturday Art Walk to Tony Natsoulas' Roz Chast cartoons come to life in downtown plaza, funk is everywhere. For this, Roy De Forest deserves much of the credit - or, perhaps, the blame. Funk is a polarizing business.

You can catch the work of both Roy De Forest and Gerald Walburg through June 24th at The Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento 1519 19th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814, (916) 498-9811, www.ccasac.org.

28  | JUNE 2007