early flemish paintings | december 09, 2004 - january 22, 2005

One can accept the fact that the "Early Flemish Paintings," by Melissa Day at Peak Gallery, are neither early nor Flemish, what with the fast and loose way we manipulate history and geography these days. But isn't it a bit much to discover that some of the works, the biggest in fact aren't paintings either, but large digital colour photographs?
Actually, this is barely the beginning of the enticing double-dealing from the 34-year-old Ontario artist now doing her MFA in Berkeley, Calif.

Added to the list of the mysteries are questions about certain secret alchemies surrounding the creation of painting itself, the overlapping careers of Jan van Eyck and brother, Hubert, and their mostly unknown sister, Margareta, who may or may not have shared her brothers' breakthrough painting talents.

Have I missed anything? Oh, yes. The artist herself.
Day is open, self-analytical and articulate when it comes to

her "Early Flemish Paintings." The works represent "a tongue-in-cheek way to teach myself how to paint," she says.

"You think of Flemish painting as the start of painting" — other than when Giorgio Vasari, the Italian painter/raconteur took credit for it — "but it is really also about the invention of oil painting. I wondered, `If you can teach yourself that, and follow their processes layer by layer, what would emerge?'"

Everything followed suit, except for three things. First, nothing worked out at all as planned. Secondly, this ended up suiting Day just fine. Thirdly, the process proves to be all about Day herself. She just had to visit a mystery woman in 15th-century northern Europe to find out.
"Actually, I was pretty arrogant to think I could make it happen," Day says of trying to reinvent the invention of painting. "I still have a hard time to put an image down with a brush. There's so much history in painting, so much weight. Every time you put that brush to canvas it's really loaded.

"I've always had an ambivalence about painting, and with this I am trying to find out what this ambivalence is all about. I like to suggest things, and leave a lot of possibilities."

At one level, she obeyed all the painterly rules. She made all the panels she needed in order to paint like the van Eycks. She applied the preparatory materials. She manufactured the pigment she wanted.

At another level, the rules were tossed out. "I did paint," she goes on. "I just left out the painting part, in terms of an image."The results — take them as Exhibit A in this mystery — can be found in a number of small painted panels on the gallery walls. These "failed Flemish paintings, exquisitely failed," as she calls them, have more American mid-century Mark Rothko abstraction in their makeup (the warmth, the banked glow of the colour) than anything from 15th-century Bruges or Ghent, where the van Eyck family were active.

This is Melissa-the-15th-century-minimalist emerging.
Her interests lay just "on the outside of painting," as she says, but not entirely separate from the real thing. In short, her research into the period proved to be as fascinating as the work that may result.

Exhibit B, Early Flemish Painting (2004), connects Day to a scene of the time. A 7-foot by over 4-foot digital photograph on canvas, this painterly image suggests religious work by the van Eycks. But instead of re-imaging a van Eyck altarpiece, Day reveals an art's altar of sorts. It is in fact an old cabinet she bought, its flat top supporting various solutions and materials — honey, rock salt, urine and copper — needed to mix the pigment verdigris, a bright golden green used on Verdigris (2004), another of her sumptuously "failed" Flemish paintings.The verdigris brewed itself in its cabinet after being mixed by Day. "The traditions were highly secretive," she says. "A lot of the ingredients were obscure. But in those times it was often a family collaborative. I am not suggesting that Margareta van Eyck may have also invented oil painting. But I was interested in her story, about someone left outside the archive."

It's about his point where you get an idea where the Margareta mystery is heading. Exhibit C, Untitled (All the Paintings Of M. Van Eyck) (2004), drags the mysterious van Eyck sister even deeper into the plot, mainly through a number of fictional books Day created stacked together with other genuine books of the period, resting in the soft folds of cloth draped over a chair.Then comes, Portrait Of M. Van Eyck (2004), a digital photo print on canvas of a smeared figure of a woman in dark clothes emerges through wavy lines of distortion. The portrait is of course, that of the artist herself, hiding and revealing herself in someone else's persona. Case closed.

Unsung oil pioneer gets her due
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT | Friday, December 24, 2004 | Page R6

Melissa Day at Peak Gallery

For her last exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery, Melissa Day, a former Kitchener, Ont., artist now studying for her master of fine art at the University of California at Berkeley, exhibited painted panels that paid a caustic anti-tribute to the over-nice colour sense (in paint-chip form) of the beleaguered Martha Stewart.

For this new exhibition, Early Flemish Paintings, Day has raised her sights and her sensibility, taking on nothing less than the origins of oil painting itself, and especially the achievements in that illustrious medium of the famous van Eyck family, which was active in the Netherlands in the early 15th century. The most gifted of that prodigiously gifted family, Jan van Eyck, maker of the famous Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and the astonishing Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), was said by Vasari to have been the actual "inventor of oil painting." But Jan had a sister, Margareta, whose portrait he painted in 1439, and about whom it was said by the poet Lucas d'Heere in 1559, that she, too, did "beautiful things in the realm of painting."

This hint about Margareta's historically peripheralized abilities has clearly galvanized Day into ambitious meditations both on paint technology and on a big-item list she offers consisting of "truth, history, beauty and gendered politics."
Margareta's having been reduced to a footnote in art history is well-addressed (and redressed) in Day's Untitled (All the Paintings of M. van Eyck). Here, in this big, banner-sized digital photograph printed on canvas, Day has stacked, on what looks to be a casually arranged bolt of raw canvas, a collection of books about the van Eycks -- including, touchingly, a few totally spurious ones about Margareta in particular. Day has thus finally given the eclipsed sister a deserving place in what is, poignantly, only a virtual history of art.

In other works in this absorbing exhibition, Day continues her exploration of oil painting's beginnings. The photograph Early Flemish Painting (which lends the exhibition its title) shows us a chunky oak chest bearing a selection of utensils and materials used to make oil paint -- used, in this case, to make the saturated green pigment called verdigris: urine, copper, honey and rock salt (a heady, alchemical brew!). Above the chest hangs what is supposedly a "Flemish oak panel," which will ultimately, one supposes, carry the new-mixed verdigris and other colours that will contribute to the making of another van Eyck. Next to this small shrine-like tribute to the mysteries of chemical art-history hangs a small painting, which is itself called Verdigris, and which gives you the idea of what the stuff looks like spread by brush on a surface (very green! very glossy!).

The rest of the exhibition is just as inventive, playful and, in the end, ruminative. Maybe Berkeley will give Day her MFA on the basis of Early Flemish Paintings alone.

$900-$5,200. Until Jan. 23,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108.

about the exhibition