This exhibition features works on paper by Los Angeles artist and poet Eve Wood. Wood celebrates the resilience and fragility of birds (and humans) in her gouache paintings, graphite drawings, and other works on paper. As if to commune with ghosts from her past, her illustrations often depict creatures in peril, a state of being in which the artist identifies. Birds have occupied a central place in Wood’s consciousness since she can remember. Her hope is that a young person will see her “drawings and be changed in some small way — if only to pay better attention to the living world around them.” She shares, “I’ve always felt a kinship with animals, probably because I find people so complicated and unknowable.”
In addition to birds, Wood’s compositions also include inventive personifications of vibrant color. Many of these “portraits of colors” appear in her book, Remarks on Color, DoppelHouse Press, 2023. Dark and sardonic with a touch of humor, Wood depicts the human conundrum of being alive and trying to navigate this planet with other humans.
