Roy DeForest, 77; painter of ‘60s Funk art taught at UC Davis

Roy DeForest, a painter often associated with the Bay Area Funk artists who captured wide attention in the 1960s for their cartoon-like images, pop-culture themes and Dadaist-style irony, has died. He was 77.

DeForest, an emeritus professor at UC Davis, died Friday at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center after a brief illness, according to Claudia Morain of the UC Davis public information office. The family did not yet know the exact cause of his death.

Several artists identified with the Funk movement, including Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley, were on the faculty of UC Davis with DeForest, who began teaching there in 1965. Another colleague, Wayne Thiebaud, known for his pop culture images, also contributed to the art department’s stellar reputation.

DeForest painted densely packed compositions filled with images of birds, farm animals, humans and other figures, some of them ominous looking. In fertile, overgrown environments that suggest Northern California, he placed free-floating men’s faces partly hidden by absurd hats, wild-eyed hounds striding through dream landscapes, rabbits sitting on human heads.

“Almost everyone appears a little uneasy ... uptight but zoned out,” a 2006 review in “Art in America” magazine noted about DeForest paintings that were on view at the George Adams Gallery in New York.

His work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and moved to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

DeForest was born in North Platte, Neb., in 1930, the son of migrant farmworkers. Through the Great Depression he moved west with his family, first to Colorado and later to Washington, where he graduated from Yakima Junior College in 1950. He went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at San Francisco State University.

He joined the UC Davis faculty as a lecturer and became a full professor in 1974. He was named an emeritus professor in 1992.

A longtime resident of the Contra Costa County town of Port Costa, DeForest is survived by his wife, Gloria; daughter, Oriana and son, Pascal, both of Concord, Calif.; as well as three sisters.

mary.rourke@latimes.com