ROY DE FOREST: NEW PAINTINGS
Drawing Gallery: The Nature of Things
December 2, 2005 - January 28, 2006
During December and January, George Adams Gallery will present new paintings by Bay Area artist Roy DeForest. The exhibition will feature seven large-scale paintings; all depicting the artist's usual suspects--men in hats, women with pronounced noses, dogs, birds, and other assorted farm animals. DeForest continues a play of color, pattern and textured surfaces to animate his unique cast of characters.
Inspired by a recent series of drawings focussing on heads, these new paintings are dominated by large single and group portraits accompanied by a patchwork of smaller images that create a narrative by association. In A Country Life, for example, the central figure is a cowboy surrounded by individual portraits of a horse, a steer, two birds, several dogs, and several variously sized portrait heads. As in his previous work, the rich and intensely worked surfaces of DeForest's paintings enhance his composition, particularly his introduction of chunks of dried acrylic that create a mosaic-like effect. In Goat Daze, for example, a painterly campfire contrasts with the central figure of a wooly goat, heavily impastoed and outlined in black. And in the work The Saga of the Shepherd Brothers the profile of a capped youth comprised of a mosaic-like cluster of bright yellow and orange paint chunks shares a dappled background of greens and browns with the brushy rendering of a panting dog.
Adding a sculptural element to the work, DeForest has created unique hand-painted frames for each painting, several with constructed creatures attached---for example, Black Horse Meadow includes a painted wood and vinyl red-eyed crow peering out from a perch at the top of the canvas.
In the drawing gallery, a small group exhibition will be on view of works on paper by Yoan Capote, Valerie Demianchuk, and William T. Wiley. Entitled The Nature of Things, the exhibition plays off the different meanings of nature and each artist's approach to thing-ness, both humorous and serious. The show will include Demianchuk's meticulously rendered pencil drawings of natural objects, as well as two watercolor and ink drawings by Wiley from the early 1970's. Yoan Capote's drawings explore the irony of human nature--most notable in the large-scale watercolor Racional depicting a classical male torso with the genitalia replaced by a brain.
Both exhibitions continue through January 28, 2006. For more information and visuals, please visit the gallery's website at www.georgeadamsgallery.com. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 6, Mondays by appointment. Email should be addressed to [email protected].
Upcoming
February -- New Work by Gallery Artists.
ADAA Art Show, Feb. 23-26. Robert Arneson: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1958 - 1992.
