Roy De Forest
United States, 1930–2007

For me, one of the most beautiful things about art is that, as painter Jean Varda once said, it is one of the last strongholds of magic. It is one of the few areas of human activity in which it is possible to do something for which you might otherwise be locked up or incarcerated. . . . You would perhaps create an impossible situation in which animals would take on greater significance; they might, for example, hold higher office, or, as in Planet of the Apes, a whole species might be displaced.

Roy De Forest, in “De Forest on De Forest,” in Roy De Forest: Recent Paintings, Drawings and Constructions (Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum, 1980), n.p.