RaveiNews (UK)Compulsively readable ... A remarkably joyful book in which the senses are tested and explored, and the boundaries of disgust and desire are redrawn.
Celia Paul
PositiveiNews (UK)The conceit takes some time to bed in. The first letter, straining with forced intimacy, is at points embarrassing to read ... Even so, written from California, where Paul is giving a talk on her paintings, it underscores the artist’s loneliness, exacerbated by homesickness ... The book’s real treasure is Paul’s discussion of John’s paintings, and the comparisons she makes with her own work. She writes of their shared preference for female subjects, and analyses John’s technique, listing her palette like a catechism.
James Fox
Ravei (UK)... nubbly detail, gathered from a considerable hinterland...puts flesh on the bones of this ambitious yet concise volume ... For Fox, the difficult topics of colour theory and optics are essential to colour’s allure; he encourages us to think of colour as a process, in which the structure of a material determines which wavelengths of light are absorbed and which are reflected, and so which colour we perceive ... As a compendium of stories and anecdotes, the book is a pleasure to dip into, but it is also a compelling and elegant whole ... The book is a rare achievement—a scholarly reference work that invites reading for pleasure. Fox moves beyond colour as a study of materials with symbolic meanings, and his book, though no panegyric, places colour, and therefore art, at the heart of the human story.
