Luminous Bodies: Circles of Celebrarion - Hardcover

Melinda Camber Porter

9781942231493: Luminous Bodies: Circles of Celebrarion

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1942231490 ISBN 13: 9781942231493

Publisher: Blake Press, 2016

Luminous Bodies is a work of celebration and mourning in two volumes of 45 watercolors in each volume. These images explore the spiritual and cultural forces that continuously vie to originate and then heal the rift between the body and the soul.

Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine states, "In an art market crowded with hollow protestations of "self-identity," Melinda Camber Porter's works offer us a new cosmology and an authentic vision of our age."

Inspired by many religious traditions of celebrations and mourning, from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to Native American mourning rituals, the series of drawings is, in actuality, a spiritual journey begun by Melinda Camber Porter a few days after the death of a loved one. The journey is narrated in drawings and in epigrammatic prose poetry inscribed within each watercolor. There is a strong "documentary" aspect to the work, which attempts to record faithfully the actual process of loss and resurrection of the lover in celebration and mourning.

But whereas in much Judeo-Christian philosophy the body is seen as the weak vehicle, the Achilles heel that catapults man into sin, Luminous Bodies proposes a world view that gives back to the body its sacrosanct nature. Human ecstasy, when body and soul unite, is the experience which is perpetually recollected and meditated upon and that serves as the pivotal visual perspective. From this vantage point a philosophical viewpoint of existence is etched, both visually [the watercolors] and in poetry [the text inscriptions].

The first volume is Luminous Bodies: Circles of Celebration. The second volume is Luminous Bodies: Circles of Mourning.

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About the Author:

Melinda Camber Porter (1953 - 2008) was born in London and graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Honors degree in Modern Languages. She began her writing career in Paris as a cultural correspondent for The Times of London. French culture is the subject of her book Through Parisian Eyes (published by Oxford University Press), which the Boston Globe describes as "a particularly readable and brilliantly and uniquely compiled collection." She interviewed many leading cultural figures including four Nobel Prize winners such as Saul Bellow and Gunter Grass, and others; Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Diddion, Frances Sagan, Michael Apted, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. Camber Porter's left over 50 audio recordings of these interviews. Her novel Badlands, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was set on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Publishers Weekly stated "a novel of startling, dreamlike lyricism." A film documenting the creation of the paintings featured in this solo exhibition, entitled The Art of Love, showed regularly on Public Television stations nationally and a collection of her poetry and paintings, also entitled The Art of Love, served as companion to the show. Camber Porter's paintings have also served as the primary inspiration and as backdrops for several of her theatrical works. She created the backdrops, book, and lyrics for the musical Night Angel, with music by Carmen Moore and was originally performed at Lincoln Center in New York City. She created the book, lyrics, and backdrops for the rock-opera-in-progress, Journey to Benares, with music, direction and choreography by Elizabeth Swados, and was performed at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City in November 2003. Melinda Camber Porter leaves a prolific and creative legacy with thousands of paintings; over two hundred hours of audio and film interviews with global creative figures in the arts, film and literature; and her tens of thousands of pages of writings: novels, plays, essays, journalism and volumes of poetry. Her creative and spiritual works will be enjoyed for generations.

Review:

"The cosmology of Christendom once defined every Westerner: for better or for worse, people understood where they stood in the universe, and where they were headed. Perhaps the exemplar of this moment most pertinent to Camber Porter is Michelangelo, whose conflation of the spiritual and the material, the chaste and the sensual, horrified and aroused his contemporaries even as it communicated the artist's highly personal understanding of God, man, and their interrelationship." Peter Trippi, Editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

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