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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.
In this volume, the Foreward, Robin Hamlyn states, "In order to produce art like Melinda Camber Porter's Luminous Bodies you have to be like William Blake. You have to be like Melinda Camber Porter. You have to be absolutely fearless." Robin Hamlyn (Senior Curator, Tate Britain Collections, 1780-1860 and world renowned William Blake expert). 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.
Melinda Camber Porter passed away of ovarian cancer in 2008 and left a significant body of work in art, journalism, and literature. With her background as a journalist for the Times of London, her questions explored the creative process used by many widely acclaimed cultural figures, filmmakers, and writers. The Melinda Camber Porter Archive wishes to share these conversations with the public to ensure the continuation and expansion of the ideas expressed in her creative works.
The first volume is Luminous Bodies: Circles of Celebration. The second volume is Luminous Bodies: Circles of Mourning.
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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.
