Big Sister

Roy De Forest

A disarmingly intimate image, Roy De Forest’s “Big Sister” is a study in human interaction, seen through a minimalist lens. De Forest was known for his exploratory style, which touched on Naive, Abstract Expressionist, and Pop genres before and after his time with the Bay Area’s Funk movement.

De Forest trained as an engineer and sign painter before focusing on fine art. His earliest works were landscapes inspired by the farmlands of northern Washington where he’d grown up, but his draw toward the non-representational was discovered once he’d relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend the SF Art Institute. In this very early piece, we see the beginning of the artist’s journey toward the rejection of easily definable meaning and style, in favor of emotion. Immersed in the experimental art scenes of mid-century American Modernism, De Forest sheds tradition and an upbringing that did not preclude an artistic path. He uses the simplest tools - the bold strokes of litho crayons, a small selection of colors, a large sheet of paper - to find the heart of his personal expression: two humans, finding connection.