Philip Hughes-Luing

Via Adorations, Via Obliquities

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Via Adorations, Via Obliquities: A Life in Love and Reflection by Philip Hughes-Luing (Author) A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Lifelong Devotion Across five decades of devotion, loss, and spiritual discovery, Philip Hughes-Luing chronicles a rare and unwavering current of love that endures through time, grief, and transformation. From youthful first love in rural Minnesota to the profound partnerships that shaped his life through the AIDS era and beyond, Via Adorations, Via Obliquities is both a tender memoir and a philosophical reflection on what it means to love without end. Through journals, poetry, and meditations, Hughes-Luing gives voice to a generation of men whose stories of fidelity and faith too often went unspoken. His words illuminate how love, queer, sacred, and human, can transcend mortality itself. He survived the deaths of four men with whom he committed to share his life. This book is for readers who have ever loved deeply, mourned profoundly, and found meaning in the mystery between. The title, Via Adorations, Via Obliquities, conveys the overall theme of the book, a spiritual quest for the meaning of love despite coping with mortality. That theme is carried out in various ways. Book 1 chronicles the genesis of young love. Book 2 uses Canonical hours for the chapter titles. There are letters to pastors, interrogations of God, and struggles to understand spirituality with or without God. Book 3 is a Song of Songs, erotic and fun. Adoration refers to reverence that is carried out through words (hymns, psalms, poetry) and actions; it is how we demonstrate love and reverence. Via Adorations describes very direct experiences of love. Obliquity is deviation from a norm, and it is through this indirect route, this interrogation of the normal idea of God, love, and creativity that a resolution is reached.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Philip D. Hughes-Luing
• Seitenzahl: 326
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. November 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 474g
• ISBN-13: 9798993542515
• Artikelnr.: 76107464

Autorenporträt

Philip Hughes-LuingHaving grown up on a subsistence farm in the rural backwoods of northern Minnesota, Philip Hughes-Luing's first exposure to artmaking occurred his freshman year of college as a nude model for the Art Department of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. A Theater and Philosophy double major, during his junior year he first enrolled in an art class. At the Art faculty's invitation, he presented a Senior Thesis show in Fine Arts his senior year.He planned to attend art school after college until a positive HIV test required the pursuit of medical insurance. He devoted twenty hours per week for nearly forty years to creating artwork while working administrative jobs at a medical center in Chicago. He has worked with charcoal and pastels, oil and acrylic paints, and ceramics.Following the death of a life partner in 1994, he moved into Artists in Residence, an apartment complex leasing only to writers, musicians, and visual artists while obtaining an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College of Chicago in 2000. Altogether, he has grieved the deaths of four intended life partners since the age of sixteen, serving as the primary caregiver for three. All four were visually or musically creative.His fourth partner died in 2013. He retired from the medical center in 2015 and retired to Grants Pass, Oregon, but following a series of strokes in 2017 sold his live-in studio along a salmon stream to stay at an assisted care facility. Physically and cognitively debilitated, he was unable to hold a pen or paintbrush. His impaired mental acuity undercut his filing for disability as well, which was denied due to insufficient documentation.Depleted, rather than filing an appeal, he donated his belongings, including forty years' worth of the artwork he'd created or collected from other artists, to a Goodwill donation center, then headed to Oregon's coast to wade away into the currents. Instead, he ended up at a homeless shelter in Eugene, Oregon, staying there for over a year composing poetry. Unable to hold a paintbrush, he used tubes of liquid paint with a "sling, splash, splatter, and drip" technique to paint on donated clothes in a public park, a collection which still constitutes most of his wardrobe. When he arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 2019, he had been homeless since April Fool's Day of 2018, which had coincided with Easter Sunday that year.In November of 2019 he obtained transitional housing located a block from the OffCenter Community Arts Project, which he started attending immediately. In February of 2020 he participated in a drawing class, using jumbo-sized chalks, and by May he could again hold and manipulate a paintbrush. He acquired an easel and has spent most of his time since then in front of it. Since May of 2020 he has created well over 250 paintings with acrylics and water-soluble oils on canvases ranging in size from 18"x24" to 30"x48". Currently he serves as Treasurer on OffCenter's Board of Directors, assists with OffCenter's weekly Writing Group, and facilitates a weekly "Tell Your Story Group" at ArtStreet, a community studio situated in the Albuquerque HealthCare for the Homeless complex.