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Secret recipes and secret optics mingle in recent work
investigating early Flemish painting practices and the fabled invention
of oil painting. Entitled Early Flemish Paintings, these life size pieces
play with a neo narrative around the van Eyck family’s mythic
role in the alchemic origins of oil painting, including Jan van Eyck’s
little known sister Margareta van Eyck.
It’s a story intimately intertwined with ideas about truth, history,
beauty and gendered politics. One of the few known historic references
to M. van Eyck is in a brief aside in an ode by the poet Lucas d’Heere
in 1559, who writes that she did ‘beautiful things in the realm
of painting.’
The unpainted oak panels speak to the possibilities of any number of
beautiful things she may have painted, which can only be imagined, and
focus our attention on the strange alchemy brewing below.
Melissa Day is an MFA candidate at the University of California,
Berkeley. Recent and upcoming shows include Roam Contemporary, New York,
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, and Berkeley Art
Museum, Berkeley. Day was recently nominated for the Dedalus Foundation
Master of Fine Arts Fellowship, New York. She is represented by Peak
Gallery, Toronto.
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