Roy De Forest; his art melded whimsy, nature

NEW YORK -- Roy De Forest, a Bay Area artist whose paintings depicted a comical, crowded frontier land of people and animals in patchworks of scorched, textured color, died on Friday in Vallejo, Calif. He was 77 and lived in nearby Port Costa.

His death was confirmed by George Adams, his New York dealer, who said the cause had not been determined.

Mr. De Forest belonged to a group of Bay Area individualists who included Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, William T. Wiley, and Peter Saul. They were often grouped under the heading of Funk, a term Mr. De Forest disliked.

Most were versed in Abstract Expressionism but gradually turned its formal lessons to narrative, non-abstract ends. Mr. De Forest's abstractions were changed into crusty maplike expanses teeming with odd textures, cartoon details, little folk-art silhouettes, and swarming dots.

He was a lover of dogs, rarely owning fewer than two. By the mid-1960s, he had developed a sardonic Americana of guys and dogs, overlapping with other animals and sometimes imaginary beings in flattened landscapes, whose hallucinatory colors and a down-home woodsiness presaged the nascent counterculture. The dots developed into coarse pointillism, becoming something of a trademark; the little dollops of paint resembled chocolate chips (or for some, LSD tabs).

The son of migrant farm workers, Mr. De Forest was born in North Platte, Neb., and grew up mostly in Yakima, Wash. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from San Francisco State College. He taught at the University of California, Davis, from 1965 to 1992.

Mr. De Forest leaves his wife, Gloria; a daughter, Oriana, and a son, Pascal, both of Concord, Calif.; and three sisters, also of California: Beth Jacobs of San Leandro, Beverly Lagiss of Livermore, and Lynn Robie of Sacramento.