November 04, 2013

Monochromatic Poetry

I have this funky CD, Death By Chocolate that I bought on a whim at some point because of the band name and the cool album art.  Turns out it is a bit of a family favorite.  It's kind of 60's-psychedelic-lava-lamp with British spoken word and school yard chants and school book recitations(?).  But it's, well, smarter than that.  Very hard to explain.





The One Little Word this month is "Color" and I immediately thought of some of the short tracks on this CD which are titled with a color's name and then a monologue of objects and feelings about the color are listed.  It's quite poetic.


I thought I would do my own version, using the same colors from the album but with my own associations.  Knowing there would be a lot of handwritten words on the page, I opted to collage my title from letters cut from a magazine.  I think it also speaks to the seeming randomness of the poems themselves:  a bunch of unrelated words that together create cohesiveness due to the single color they conjure; the letters, all of various color, font, and size yet they come together to form words.







MUSTARD YELLOW

large envelopes
high school jackets
Pee Chee folders
#2 pencils
baby food and jaundice
Cowardice
rain boots
banana slugs
curried chicken
school buses and taxi cabs
flowering weeds
pollen, saffron, sulphur
Burning nostrils
caution tape
Yield
Slow
Bump Ahead






 SKY BLUE

cotton candy
swimming pools
worn denim
Mom's eyes
bubble gum ice cream
cartoon elephants
tropical seas
chlorine and clean laundry
toothpaste
robins' eggs, candied and real
Restful napping in a hammock



For a couple  of the colors, I couldn't think of enough items to fill the space I'd painted, so I just repeated my words to fill up the area.




ORANGE

sunsets
popsicles and Happiness
orange peel smiles
basketballs
pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns
carrots
kumquats
monarch butterflies
campfires and construction vests
tigers
orangutans
Fall leaves and Halloween
cantaloupe
San Francisco Giants



OLIVE GREEN

wallpaper and carpet
my teenage telephone
frogs
grass stains
damp forests
eucalyptus scented lotion
army men
dinosaurs
split pea soup
Frankenstein
spinach and herbs
concert smoke
Pop-pop's face after a roller coaster ride



I painted this face on a piece of deli paper placed over a magazine ad, loosely tracing the model's face with black paint.  Once collaged onto my background of blocks of color, perhaps you see that the idea was inspired by the CD's cover art.  





RED

ladybugs
fire trucks
cheerleaders
scraped knees
stop signs and stop lights
spaghetti sauce
Embarrassment
red cheeks
Kool Aid moustaches
Valentines
Santa's suit and Rudolph's nose
cherries
strawberries
Chapstick and cough drops
Passion
Anger
Love


Thank you for stopping by and checking out this creation!  Head over to OLW to see all the fabulous and COLOR inspired pieces by the designers and readers alike!  I'll be linking up to Friday's Art Journal Every Day feature on Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's blog, too!


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