Remarks on Color

by Eve Wood

Overview

Artist, critic and poet Eve Wood has a ribald sense of humor and for decades has had a distinctive presence in the Southern California art world. This is her first monograph, featuring a collection of off-beat, imaginative color studies populated with birds, animals and irreverent, sometimes naughty personae. Short, laugh-out-loud prose accompanies each of the portraits and vivid scenes. Her dog sleeps on a Ukranian-gold and blue rug; her raven vacuums the house; absurd characters from movies and art stand in for obnoxious or dreamy colors; and the birds – so many birds – sing of freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954600225
Publisher:	DoppelHouse Press
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Eve Wood is a Los Angeles-based artist and art critic for Artillery Magazine, Tema Celeste, Whitehot, Art & Cake, and Riot Material. Her writing and poetry has been widely published in magazines and literary journals such as The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 1997, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Denver Quarterly, Poetry, The Santa Monica Review, The Seattle Review, and many others. She holds a BFA and MFA (1992, 1994) from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UC Irvine (1996) in creative writing. She is the recipient of a Jacob Javits Fellowship and a California Community Foundation Fellowship. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, Ochi Projects, and Track 16 Gallery, which currently represents her. She is the author and/or illustrator of seven collections of poetry and chapbooks; her latest book of poems, A Cadence for Redemption (Del Sol Press) constitutes an imaginary conversation between Abraham Lincoln and a 21st century American woman trying to make sense of the chaos around her, with a focus on socio-political issues such as bigotry, hate crimes, war, apathy and personal responsibility.

Read an Excerpt

Marooned Maroon
Maroon is unmoored, untethered, unhinged, and completely undone by the weight of isolation, marooned as she is on an unnamed island somewhere in the South Pacific. Alone, she communes with phantoms that include the likes of Oscar Wilde, Salome, Kierkegaard, and of course the ever elusive, but charming Amelia Earhart, with whom she eats Dungeness crabs every other Sunday by the seaside. Amelia, having gone missing for eighty-four years and some change on the same unknown island, has some experience with the “Castaway Syndrome,” and has proven to be a terrific friend and ally, often sharing her coconuts.

Yet, despite this hospitality, Maroon is strangely inconsolable, forever looking for other like-minded colors like Sangria, Burnt Sienna, and Chili Pepper Red with whom she might share her sadness. It isn’t so much the loneliness that confounds her, but the lack of representation as the island is small and largely dominated by various shades of green and blue. And let’s not forget the ubiquitous sun, nearly unforgiving in its radiance. So much yellow can drive a girl mad! Maroon searches the island for some sign of herself, some likeness beneath the rocks, a brief swell of red algae or florideae in the tides, but every time she is disappointed.

Maroon longs for the city with its flashing neon lights, and the smell of burning rubber. She misses the nightclubs with exotic names like The Red Iguana, Hot Coals, and The Fiery Furnace, and finally devises a way to get back there. After all, Maroon could only stay marooned for so long, having finally decided to build her own boat to sail back to civilization and the wonders of the modern world. It’s a small and agile craft made from the wood of the Black Cherry tree and the flowering Dogwood, both of which, when saturated with water, turn red.

Denouement Daffodil
Denouement Daffodil is a real downer and the first person to leave the party, proffering reasons like “I must go home and feed my guppies,” or “I can’t concentrate because my nose hairs are making me sneeze.” Always quick to wrap things up and never one for a winded story, Denouement Daffodil refuses to stand in line for more than two minutes, which makes shopping for the latest couture quite challenging. Instead, she orders things online, but if the delivery takes more than 24 hours, she promptly sends the item back. DD is a self-proclaimed “tidy-maker,” an individual who cannot stomach the thought of procrastination. She has a particular dislike for people with endless patience like those folks who wait for 72 hours in the pouring rain on Black Friday just to get a new pair of sneakers.

DD has a weekly blog called “Down Time” where she features stories about people who waited too long on the ski lift and sadly met an untimely end, or the guy who was told his timing belt was about to snap, yet he drove across country anyway. Needless to say, his Buick wound up in a ditch. DD regularly excoriates people for overcooking their vegetables, calling into famous cooking shows and complaining that the chefs are lazy, waiting too long for the noodles to boil while the broccolini sits simmering for three extra minutes in the pan. She finds it personally offensive when she sees people lining up at In & Out for an overcooked grease fest of oil laden fries and brown meat, some even waiting as much as an hour in the hot sun to get their fat fix.

Denouement Daffodil has ceased going on the internet as it takes too long for her computer to connect, and soon she begun to lose her hair with every passing minute. Her solution was to purchase a sensory deprivation tank which she had installed in her living room. Like Jean Paul Marat, she even set up a small writing desk inside the tank to ensure a state of perfected silence and is currently at work on a new self-help book entitled “People Suck, But I Move Mountains,” soon to be released to a limited readership.

Iguana Green
Iguana Green went traipsing thru the undergrowth, the stub of a burned-out cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth and a bottle of Jack tied to her tail. It had been a difficult week in the verdant jungles of Southern Brazil. Just a few weeks prior she’d been lounging effortlessly at a beachfront resort, sipping Mai Tais, all the while trying to achieve the perfect tan so she would look good at the disco, but things didn’t work out as she’d planned.

After the wayward helicopter crashed into her custom-built Iguana estate, everything began to go terribly, terribly wrong, and that’s when Iguana Green began to change color. Unlike chameleons, iguanas cannot change color at will. They change as a result of environmental factors, of which a helicopter crash factors in as a veritable disaster by iguana standards. Not only was the event disruptive to her active social life (many of her most cherished companions fled the forest), but to make matters worse, she lost her entire wardrobe!

After that, Iguana Green began to change color at an alarming rate. At first no one seemed to notice that her once verdant skin had shifted to a sickening olive tone, nearly khaki, and then finally, and irrevocably to a drab and unforgiving brown — not coffee brown, hickory or mocha. Not mahogany, carob, chocolate, tawny, penny, cedar, walnut or russet, but the color of a steaming pile of dog poop.

Embarrassed, she refused to leave the house until finally, hungry and discouraged, she set out to find a bottle of a new product she’d heard about called Iguana Cure – guaranteed to cover up any and all iguana blemishes including unwanted color shifts. The beauty of this product meant Iguana Green could be any color she wanted at any time. Mondays she was blue, Tuesdays orange, Wednesdays yellow and so forth until another boring and predictable week was done. Brimming with new color, back to the disco she went, and the rest, as they say is Iguanistory.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Past Works:

“Quickened by passion and imagination, the body of poems that makes up Love’s Funeral is astoundingly alive.”
—Mark Strand, Pulitzer prize winning poet laureate

“The exactitude of Wood's language coupled with the strength of poetic vision, concretizes otherwise overwhelming themes into simple and beautifully executed poetic moments that are imbued with compassion and consideration of all that makes us divinely human.”
—North American Review

“In a creepy-funny wall-work by Eve Wood, hooks in the shape of bent human fingers probe the space around a chunk of burled birch."
—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

“A fresh, saturated palette of emerald, crimson, azure, and canary and quirky expressive brushwork, as well as distended figures and perspectives that at times approach outright caricature, sacrifice realism at the altar of post illustrative mannerism.”
—Shana Nys Dambrot, Modern Painters

From the Publisher