Forrest Bess, born in Bay City, Texas, was a painter. Bess admired the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder and developed his own mystical minimalism. Bess's insistence on isolation in a trailer in a Texas swamp and elaborate theories on immortality through self-administered hermaphrodite surgery made him something of an outsider artist. His known work consists of only about 100 paintings, a number of which have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He died in a Bay City nursing home 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.