"Paws" to celebrate National Dog Week!Dogs have a prominent place in the fantasy worlds of Roy De Forest's paintings.
Man's Best Friend
"Paws" to celebrate National Dog Week!Dogs have a prominent place in the fantasy worlds of Roy De Forest's paintings.
In the early 1960s, De Forest turned from making scrap metal constructions and paintings of abstract patterns to works in which animals, totemic images, and fantastical beings are vehicles for storytelling and game playing. In this engaging yet inexplicable scene, walls are cut away to confuse inside and outside worlds, and animals and humans seem both toylike and symbolic.
De Forest, who calls art "one of the last strongholds of magic," describes his richly colored and textured fantasy worlds as "unknowable [though] hauntingly familiar."
Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (exhibition text, National Museum of American Art, 1987).
Pictured: Roy De Forest, born 1930, The Real Inside Story, 1973, acrylic, 66 x 72 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.