Out West, Roy DeForest
500 piece jigsaw puzzle
Finished size: 19" x 19"
Created exclusively for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, this 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is beautiful, challenging and fun!
“I have always been a novelistic painter, and even when I was making abstract painting it was like creating a map, basically, and the map then turns into a landscape and the landscape adds figures, and that is a little bit of the history of my painting, although it is very influenced by abstract painting, Mondrian and what have you.” —Roy De Forest
Bright colors, cartoonlike figures, and richly textured surfaces characterize De Forest’s aesthetic and connect him with California Funk Art, a movement that included other San Francisco Bay Area artists such as William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson.
De Forest considered each painting “the depiction of a little adventure.” The cowboys, dogs, and horses that populate the landscape of Out West are common figures in his work and reflect his childhood on a farm. Their reappearances in De Forest’s works elevate them to archetypal status, creating a mythopoeic narrative.