Viewing page 17 of 23

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

AT&T Yahoo! Mail - robie@sbcglobal.net           Page 2 of 4 

Page 2 of 4

"Roy was a man with a good and great sense of irony," recalled artist Wayne Thiebaud, a professor emeritus at UC Davis and longtime friend and colleague. "He was not interested in any kind of preciousness, prestige or any of that nonsense. He pursued his work with real genuineness, regardless of what others thought."

DeForest's work was exhibited throughout the United States, most prominently at a Roy DeForest Retrospective that opened in 1974 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and then moved in 1975 to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

In a review of DeForest's last New York show, at the George Adams Gallery in Chelsea in 2005, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith declared the septuagenarian painter's work had "never been more clearly or radiantly stated."

"At 75, Mr. DeForest is painting pretty much what he has painted for years: dogs, men in hats or headdresses, and supernatural beings against a flattened terrain ... These works have a blatant, consummate ease," Smith wrote at the time.  "If Mr. DeForest's goal is to transfer the ecstatic experience of the world from his creature-subjects to his creature-viewers, it has never been more clearly or radiantly stated."

The critic also lamented that DeForest's "singular greatness," like that of other "regional" artists, including Robert Arneson, is "less fixed in the art world consciousness that (it) should be."

DeForest was born in 1930 in North Platte, Neb., the son of migrant farmworkers.  He grew up in Nebraska, Colorado and eastern Washington state.  He received an associate degree in math and humanities from Yakima Junior College in Yakima, Wash., in 1950, and spent the next decade studying art.  He attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in art at San Francisco State university.

By 1965, when he joined UC Davis as a lecturer, DeForest had established a national reputation as a painter.  He became an assistant Professor in 1967, rose to full professor in 1974 and remained on the full-time faculty until the summer of 1982.  He continued teaching part-time until December 1992, when he retired with a title of professor emeritus.

In addition to Thiebaud and Arneson, DeForest's colleagues in he UC Davis art department included such prominent artists as William Wiley, Manuel Neri and Ralph Johnson.

"The UC Davis art department in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was dedicated to the notion that there are a lot of ways to make art," said retired professor Harvey Himmelfarb, who chaired the department in the mid-80s.  "The faculty was made up, very deliberately, of artists who were as different from each other as possible in their ideas about art and their approaches to art, and who were the best possible representatives of a particular way to make art.

"The idea was to expose students to as many ways to make art as possible, and let them find their own way.  It was an incredibly enriching experience -- and Roy was an absolutely major contributor."

http://us.f815.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?box=Inbox&MsgId=9591_11594912_31923_2111...  5/22/2007