About
In the late 1960s, a circle of artistsโincluding Roy De Forest, Clayton Bailey, David Gilhooly, Peter Saul and Robert Arnesonโadopted the label โNut Art.โ Each artist adopted a โnuttyโ artistic alter egoโBailey, for instance, dubbed himself Dr. Gladstone, while De Forest began to identify as Doggie Dinsmour.
Along with writer David Zack, De Forest penned a stirring โNut Art Manifesto,โ taking pains to distinguish their work from the โFunk Artโ enshrined in Peter Selzโs 1967 exhibition. โThe work of a peculiar and eccentric nut,โ the manifesto noted, โcan truly be called โnut art.โโ Nut artists turned inward to illustrate an inner dreamscape: โThe nut artificer travels in a phantasmagoric micro-world, small and extremely compact, as is the light of a dwarf star imploding inward and in passage collapsing paradise and hell to one as it vanishes forever with our joys, sorrows and unrequited love.โ
Unlike other artists featured in Selzโs โFunkโ show, Nut artists produced โphantasmagoric micro-worlds,โ surrealist and almost psychedelic in nature, with distinctive characters and visual themes recurring throughout works created in a wide variety of media. De Forest, for example, spent decades illustrating a whimsical universe populated by dogs, horses and rabbits in works ranging from oil paintings, to prints and monumental sculptures. Bailey, similarly, produced an imagined world of monsters and dinosaurs, while Gilhooly depicted a mindscape of campy frogs. These artists created fantastical artistic realms reflecting each particular artistโs inner life. ย
