Customer Reviews

COLORMAN

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The Colorman - a novel by Erika Wood

The art world of Manhattan, with its pretentious artists, and a bucolic Hudson River town, home to a mysterious paint manufacturer, are the settings for this tale of love loss and redemption. What impresses me most about this Dickensian tale of a motherless waif, a cold stepmother, and a strange man with a murky past is its rare description of the tormenting and thrilling process of making art:

It was formulaic and facile. It was predictable and pompous. Deceitful and dead. It was just plain bad, and it was sticking to her like fly paper.
Rain gripped the stretcher bar and plunged her box cutter straight into the canvas. Past its gooey facade and into the weave. ...Yanking the blade out again, Rain hauled off and slashed the canvas straight through from left to right.
Each stab was a release. Each slash unburdened barriers she hadn't realized she'd constructed.

The plot follows a typical girl-overcomes-adversity pattern. Rain Morton, an aspiring young artist with a seemingly idyllic existence, has everything going for her - a doting father who's a renowned author, a successful art dealer stepmother and a well connected art critic husband. But life unravels when her husband has an affair then sabotages her career only to leave Rain spiraling downward in an orgy of self-pity. Numbed by booze, reality TV, and the internet, she one day finds inspiration from an improbable location: a county sheriff's site, and more improbably from the pigments given to her by James Morrow, the novel's mysterious and reclusive paint manufacturer. The down and dirty physicality of his arcane and ancient methods- scavenging road kill, grinding bones and cooking fat- bolster Rain's uncertain steps as she reaches for a truer, more authentic form of expression.

Honesty and authenticity thus transform what might have been a simple chick lit piece into an insightful explication of the art making process, one that could only come from real experience. The importance of light and color to a painter is built into the structure of the novel by naming chapters for each color in the rainbow, with the addition of black (the absence of color) and white (all parts of the visible spectrum). The feeling each color evokes is beautifully illustrated by quotes from a wide range of poets, artists and musicians, as in the following Jimi Hendrix quote:.

PURPLE

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same
Actin'funny, but I don't know why
`Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
- Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix associates purple with a definite mental state, whereas other writer's color associations are more oblique, but they always illustrate an interaction between thinking and feeling that is necessary for the production of art. This is further underscored in the beginning of each chapter by a catalogue of associations we have with a color and by historical details about the origin and manufacture of pigments- "Purple is royalty, a connotation that has everything to do with the extreme value of the pigments available for cloth-dying in antiquity." Wood writes. "Tyrian purple was the original purple dye, created from tiny snail-like mollusks." The quest for truth and beauty amid the sordid reality of life is thus the real story of The Colorman and readers will be delighted to learn that in order to write this book, Wood, who had some previous experience fabricating three-dimensional abstract pieces, started drawing portraits which readers can find on her website.

Susanne Forestieri
[...]

I absolutely loved The Colorman by Erika Wood and could not put it down once I began reading it. At first I was not sure what to expect from a book about the New York art world, but the reviews were so impressive and so interesting in their description that I was excited to give it a try. I quickly learned that you don't have to love art or be knowledgeable about the art scene to really appreciate the creative genius of the author. Erika Wood writes with fluid purpose, meticulous attention to word choice, honesty, and mystery. For example, her rich description of the art materials, pigments, and ingredients is so unapologetically detailed and engaging and you become immediately immersed in the vivid colors (and emotional lives) of the characters. This novel clearly furthered my appreciation of the complex process of creating art and of entering the art world. In addition, Wood writes with deep insight and complexity about human connection as well as loss. You don't have to be an artist to love this book but you will find your self engaged and inspired by the true originality of this debut novel. I highly recommend this book!

Wonderful work by this rising star in her first novel.
Difficult to put down. Great descriptive passages about my beloved Hudson Valley.
A book to devour with all of your senses.

This book was compelling and when I had finished it I found myself rereading parts and thinking about them. It was like spending time with a really interesting friend and not wanting to leave just yet. It works on many levels, all of which are interesting. One one level it is about the art world and one artists struggle to navigate through it. It is certainly interesting as a primer on the technical and emotional aspects of color and worked on that level as well. I found myself drawn in to these areas and taking time to consider them. But on a deeper level it was about human relationships and self discovery. The author has captured universal emotions in a way that has made me consider my own life since putting "The Colorman" down.

I occasionally reread books but they are usually clasics I read many years ago. I have actually put this book next to my most comfortable reading chair and look forward to spending some more time with it very soon.

The Colorman is a delightful and deeply impressive first novel about Rain Morton, a young woman who loves to paint. She moves uncomfortably among the men in her life - a famous father, a distant husband, and a mysterious paintmaker hiding in a 19th-century factory overlooking the Hudson River - as she experiments with painting styles that she hopes will please them. While Rain searches for love and inspiration, novelist Erika Wood teaches us about color and paint, art and history, but she never loses the funny, passionate voice that makes the novel such a joy to read. It is a story filled with cute guys on hiking trails (yes!), skinny girls in Soho art galleries (no!), colorful women, autumn leaves and a well-kept family secret. When Rain finally stops trembling and finds her own voice as an artist, we share her pride and look forward to the sequel. Colorman II?