Forrest Bess _ About Forrest Bess
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Bess in 1951
Bess in his studio
Forrest Clemenger Bess, 1911-1977
term myself a visionary painter for lack of a better word. I can
close my eyes in a dark room and if there is no outside noise or
attraction, plus, if there is no conscious effort on my partthen I
can see color, lines, patterns, and forms that make up my
canvases. I have always copied these arrangements exactly without
elaboration." Throughout his life as an artist, Forrest Bess strove to invest a
personal symbology with meaning, developing a complex visual vocabulary to
accompany his obsessive devotion to beliefs and theories that alienated him
from the mainstream.
SEE ALSO: Chronology of life and work
Bess's small paintings are filled with elemental and highly personal images. To
Bess, his visions and the resulting paintings came to represent a pictorial
language that he believed had universal significance. Along with medical and
psychological theories based on his own unguided scholarship, he believed his
imagery formed a blueprint for an ideal human state, with the potential to
relieve mankind of suffering and death.
Born October 5, 1911, in Bay City, Texas, Bess lived his life there in virtual isolation, on a strip of land accessible
only by boat. "I try to tell myself that only by breaking completely away from society can I arrive at a reasonableexistence." A semi-migrant childhood was followed by some years at college, where he began by studying
architecture but found himself diverted into studies of religion, psychology, and anthropology, readings that
would later inform his own radical theories.
Dropping out of university in 1932, Bess worked for several years
roughnecking in the Beaumont oil fields, and also made several
trips to Mexico. It was during this time he began to exhibit his
paintings, earning one-person shows at museums in San Antonio
and Houston. During the war he enlisted in the Army Corps of
Engineers and was given the task of designing camouflage, until
he suffered a psychological breakdownand left the service. Afterliving for a while in San Antonio, he finally settled at his family's
camp at Chinquapin, near Bay City.
Bess was never comfortable for very long around other people,
although he hosted frequent visitors to his home and studio at
Chinquapin: artists, reporters, and some patrons made the trip to
the spit of land on which Bess 's shack stood. He did forge lasting relationships with a few friends and neighbors,
and maintained years-long friendships and correspondence with Meyer Schapiro and with Betty Parsons, his art
dealer in New York.
But ultimately Bess prefered solitude, and his prolific activitiesas an artist, highlighted by limited notoriety and success,
alternated with longs spells of loneliness, depression, and an
ever-increasing obsession with his own anatomical manifesto.
He was never able to win any converts to his theories or
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The studio at Chinquapin
validation from the many doctors and psychologists with whom
he corresponded. In his own home town of Bay City, he was
considered something of a small-town eccentric.
Forrest Bess died in a Bay City nursing home in 1977 from skin
cancer. In the years following his death, his reputation as an
artist began to build, and he is now regarded as a unique
phenomenon, an artist who cannot be grouped with any one
school but who answered solely and completely to his own vivid,personal vision.
R E F E R E N C E S :
Michael Ennis, "His Name Was Forrest Bess," Texas Monthly,June 1982.
John Yau, "Forr est Bess," exhibition catalog, Hir schel & Adler Modern, New York, 1988.
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