What makes a celebrated gift book into a bona fide collector’s item? Holiday shoppers will get a chance to find out when the creators of ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love, autograph copies of their celebrated work December 11 and 12 from 1-3 p.m. at Ex Libris Book Store, 228 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Savannah, Georgia. (Ex Libris is the official bookstore for SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design).
ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love, has joined the ranks of treasured collectibles largely for two reason: One is the fact that many of the original 60 plus color paintings reproduced in the book now hang in fine art collections around the world, including in the famed Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Secondly, over the course of the 17 years that it took to produce the book, the poetry and essays accompanying the art have appeared in such international periodicals as ESSENCE Magazine and won critical acclaim on web sites across the Internet.
In addition, both of the creators of ELEMENTAL have direct links to the celebrated Harlem Renaissance/Jazz Age of the 1920s-1940s, which is not something that can be said of most living artists and authors. Vann actually received his first art lessons from Harlem Renaissance painter Charles “Spanky” Alston, and Aberjhani co-authored (with Sandra L. West) the world’s first Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts On File).
“The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work,” Vann noted in his preface to the book, “includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social harmony, and that regenerative stream of life sustained upon the earth itself… It also embraces such simple and yet essential things as the psychic nourishment received from family and friends while growing up; and the welcoming kindness received from ‘strangers’ when venturing forth into the world.”
ELEMENTAL will be on sale at 20 percent off during the book signing at Ex Libris. For more information on the event, please contact Sandra Brown at (912) 525-7550.
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