THE Magazine - Los Angeles

As both a writer and a painter, Michael Deyermond has long pursued parallel tracks in giving voice to his notoriously caustic impressions of life, viewed through the dual prism of art and letters. His hilariously vicious and pithy literary sensibility, his personal affection for not only the contents but the fraught physicality of books as objects, and a visual style that is part text-based image-making, part painterly impasto, and deliberately rough around the edges, first combined in a series of painted books in which Deyermond painted them new covers featuring brassy synopses that both personalize and subvert the nobility of the masterpieces so defiled -- er, enshrined. What to make of Moby Dick restated as "I Hunt Me" against a slate-blue background of topographic, abstract ocean waves, or To Kill a Mockingbird's exhortation, "Don't you dare name your child after me!" With saturated colors and seductive color fields surrounding his text, the paintings from that series could always have been viable works on their own graphic strengths -- and now, in the final piece of this circular metonymical puzzle, they are. A new series of watercolors and prints as well as many of the zingiest book-cover paintings have recently been exhibited and collected in book form, forming a kind of infinite hall-of-mirrors mantle for the ongoing series. In perhaps the most self-aware, insightful instance from the series, Deyermond graces all his influences: Ed Ruscha's They Called Her Styrene, itself a book of world-paintings to begin with, reads simply, "Ka-Ching."