Sacred Vedic Mandalas And The Spell Of Beyond Knowing: Work By Melissa Forbes

Melissa has been a student and teacher of yoga for over twenty years and studied the art of Vedic Yantras in India. This exhibition features her drawings and paintings as well as her sacred vedic mandalas and yantras.

Exhibit One
All the Muses and the Graces

…including Vedic gods & goddesses, and celestial atmospheres.

Yantra means “an apparatus” in sanskrit, it is a mystical diagram, or visual mantra, composed of geometric shapes that create, by sight, the vibrations and other mystical effects of a mantra. The act of wearing, drawing, or concentrating on a Mandala/Yantra is said to have spiritual or magical benefits. A Yantra focuses spiritual and mental energies to improve one’s quality of life, to invoke a particular Divine Vibration or Archtype.

Exhibit Two
The Spell of Beyond Knowing

This exhibition features large scale drawings & paintings in an effort to achieve “healing through inspired movement and visual expression”.

 

Melissa Forbes has been a student of yoga since her mid twenties. Her interest in yoga became more singularly focused after finding inspiration in the tradition of the yogi scholar Shi T. Krishnamacharya and his students Pattabhi Jois, and T.K.V. Desikachar. Melissa began her career teaching Desikachar style yoga and was the co-founder of the internationally renowned Heart of Yoga. She has taught yoga in numerous schools throughout the United States, among them, the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center in New York City, where she worked closely with Dr. Rudolph Ballentine, a student of Swami Rama, who founded the Himalayan Institute.

Melissa began her study of art, as well as dance and movement in her youth. Painting and design, along side dance and movement, are her ongoing passions. Melissa’s art career began with her studies of textile design at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, followed by a five-year full scholarship in printmaking at New York’s National Academy Press. She was the recipient of an Ogden M. Pleissner Fellowship, a Nancy O’Malley Fellowship, a Ricky Fingerhut Fellowship and a Ralph Fabri Fellowship. Melissa was also granted the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Grant.

She is presently involved in an independent study of Vedic Yantras, having studied in India with students of Harish Johari. Her Yantric renderings reflect both her artistic expression and intimate experiences of Yogic disciplines. They are quite unique as they combine Eastern and Western Sacred Geometry. Most recently, sixteen of Melissa’s vibrational Yantra art paintings were featured in the book, “Karttikeyan Yogic Method”, published by Gatherinsight.com. Her art has been exhibited in galleries in New York City, Philadelphia, and the United Nations. She maintains a studio in New York while frequently traveling and painting in majestic locations around the world.

For the five years leading up to his passing in 2007, Melissa traveled with the late sage U.G. Krishnamurti, and made Switzerland her home. Upon his passing, Melissa moved back to the United States, and is currently living in the Taconic Hills of New York State. Melissa is presently an Adjunct Professor of Art at the University of New Haven, Connecticut, while continuing to teach yoga.

In addition to her interests and experiences in yoga and art, Melissa has formally studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming under Richard Bandler cofounder of NLP, Shiatsu (Certified Ohashiatsu Practitioner), Certified Divine Intervention TeacherMinister, and Certified Teacher of Mayan Sacred Geometry, graduate of Suluk Academy school of Sufi studies and Four Wind Society Light Body School.

She is the author of “No Teaching Yoga, The Authentic Guide”, a work reflecting her time with U.G. Krishnamurti, a brief history of yoga, a collection of Vedic Yantras and Melissa’s eight Miracle Combination practices.