The Art of Love: Love Poems and Paintings

Inspired by William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Melinda Camber Porter explores desire in her paintings and poetry. Leo Castelli says, “Not since William Blake has an artist created such a profound relationship between the visual and verbal worlds.” Saul Bellow says, “The great meltdown of modern sexual anarchy is the real subject of Melinda Camber Porter’s work.” Ms. Porter’s fifty five love poems are in their directness and pure lyrical quality a reminder of Yeats. They speak of unrequited love and loneliness into glimpses of infinite and transcendent experience of love. Ms. Porter’s twelve paintings are uniquely modern in their iconoclasm and simultaneously have a deep connection to painting traditions of Gauguin and Matisse in her use and understanding of light and image.