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Show goes to the dogs, cats, and insects, too By Bill Varble It's a world in which cartoon dogs pull the carts of red devils that look like they're straight out of a Maurice Sendak book ... A world in which Kernal Bentleg, a frontier archetype in the tradition of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan, hobnobs with giant grasshoppers ... A world in which a painter paints a painter who's painting a denizen of a forest whose other denizens are painting the landscape around them all ... It's "Wild Beasts," an outlandish exhibit of large paintings with animals in them by noted artists Roy De Forest and Galen Hansen. The exhibit was organized by the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Great Falls, Mont. The exibit opened Friday at the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University and continues through Dec. 11. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 5 to 7 p.m. the first Friday of each month. For more information, call 552-6245. De Forest is one of the best-known artists of the San Francisco Bay Area, a veteran of the Beat scene and a founder of the Funk movement whose paintings hang in prestigious galleries and command serious money (the price tags on these paintings may take your breath away). Gaylen Hansen holed up in Palouse, Wash., teaching at Washington State University for 25 years, but has emerged as a one-man force for quirky creativity. One critic said that what Joyce did to Dublin in "Ulysses," Hansen does to everyday life in small-town Washington. Both men were born on farms -- De Forest in North Platte, Neb., and Hansen in Garland, Utah. They figure that's strong circumstantial evidence that if you have your head pointed at the heavens and your boots pointed at the compost heap you'll start picking up on certain associations, a certain swirl and flow of the country. Maybe it has something to do with a certain fascination with animals, too. "I find that ... dogs are wonderful to look at," De Forest says. "They don't need clothes, jewelry." In "Incident on Devil's Island," an acrylic painting, De Forest shows a happy dog pulling a dog cart in which sits a man. The two are surrounded by red devils, one with a bird beak, one who appears to be gazing idly at his own feet, one wearing a grass skirt and riding a Saint Bernard. A scowling little head may remind you of billionaire pipsqueak H. Ross Perot. The whole thing looks like a cross between Marc Chagall and Hieronymous Bosch as done by Mad magazine. What's going on here? De Forest is frankly not very interested in academic analysis of the artistic process. He keeps telling students to take themselves less seriously. "Drawing and even painting are much closer to the very human activity of making a mess or making mud pies than they are to learning to draw or paint," he says. Hansen's large oils look like expressions of a similar philosophy. In his "Interior with Maroon Sofa," a giant grasshopper perches on the back of a couch on which sits a man in a hat. "I especially like grasshoppers because they are so paintable," Hansen says. "They have a very simple shape and they're not too intricate." In Hansen's "Artist's Studio," a bearded artist in sneaks (surely Hansen himself) puffs at his pipe and stares, artist-like, at some inchoate shapes on the wall as behind him, a school of trout has come in through the ceiling in a feeding frenzy. A pair of geese zoom around the room, and a giant house cat watches in cat-like contentment. In "Cat," a cat painting to end all cat paintings, a giant cat head and shoulders take up almost all of a 6-by-7-foot canvas. "If you fill a canvas with a big dog head, that's very different from putting a tiny dog head in the middle of the canvas," he says. It's true of grasshoppers, too. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA