Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman

by Yael Lipschutz, Philippe Vergne, Cameron (Artist)

A key underground figure of Los Angeles' midcentury counterculture, Cameron (1922–95) created a body of visionary painting and drawing that won her equal esteem among the Californian assemblage artists and the occult world of that time. Her powerful personality led to a number of roles in key underground movies such as Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome , and her features adorn the cover of the first issue of Wallace Berman's Semina . Today, her delicate melding of Surrealism and mysticism has been rediscovered by a younger generation of artists. This volume, published for an exhibition at MOCA LA, includes pieces formerly thought lost, ranging from early paintings to drawings, sketchbooks and poetry, as well as ephemera, collaborations and correspondence with individuals such as her husband, Jack Parsons (the rocket pioneer, cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and acolyte of Aleister Crowley), and mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Genres: Thelema, Art

88 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 2015

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sweet tease of lost worlds. Marjorie Cameron is one of the most interesting people in the underground culture of the 20th Century and this museum catalog of an exhibit of her paintings is the best collection of her weird, wonderful paintings yet assembled. Sadly, many of her paintings are gone forever, preserved monochromatically in Curtis Harrington's documentary film Wormwood Star, so this slender volume may be the best record we will ever have. Her early paintings are especially powerful and one can only wish she had painted more of them and they had found buyers who preserved them. Given the occult inspiration of her work though, the loss is appropriate and any mysteries they might have revealed remain hidden.

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If not written, a history that can be hallucinated is the only strategy to overcome the gruesome cruelty of a culture that has neglected the values of humanity for too long, a culture that might leave the negative trace of systematic erosion, destruction, and obliteration" p. 7