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Haley Mellin (Art Practice Major)
"Ancient Egyptian Mummy Portraits: Looking into the Faces of the Past and Present"
Sponsor: Professor Katherine Sherwood, Art Practice
Project Description
An Art Practice major, Haley will paint a series of portraits using the techniques and materials found in the Fayum mummy portraits of Ancient Egypt. These portraits, created during the first and second centuries CE for burial ritual purposes, are heralded for their technical and emotive mastery. Haley will conduct fieldwork in New York, London and Cambridge, England, researching the technical aspects of the portraits by viewing eighty of the most acclaimed paintings and consulting with some of the premier researchers in this field. Studying under Greek painter Eurphosyne Dioxidis, Haley will learn the hard tool, resin binding and encaustic painting techniques that have preserved the portraits over the last 2000 years. The project will culminate in a spring exhibition of her paintings at the Worth Ryder gallery on the UC Berkeley campus. She will also produce a digital compilation of a selection of Fayum portraits, together with their methods and recipes, for reference by other artists and art historians.
Scholar's Photo
Scholar's Journal
July 5, 2001 - London, England
I have been visiting a series of Fayum portraits (Ancient Egypt, ~100 AD) at the Petrie Museum this week, with a few hours of time spent each day in the library of the British Museum. I peek into the National Gallery to see more recent portraiture, Rembrandt's self portraits in particular keep me returning daily.
What fascinates me about the Fayum paintings is that they were creative in a fundamental sense, as funerary paintings they were to bring to life for eterntiy what they pictorally represent. The portraits show that size and monumentality are not directly related, as the paintings are quite small but hold the largeness of a presence and a time period lost long ago.
It is incredible to think of the artist painting this one portrait of a woman (UC38770, 200 A.D.) - it feels like the woman is still alive. She waits, wondering what the painter sees, he has the most impossible job! To preserve her breathing, her patient eye, into the afterlife! In painting the skins surface as it moves about the face, the painter is navigating the place where she begins - asking, what is this beginning? What is this creature?
How is it that the eyes in all of the portraits have survived so well over the last 2000 years? The rest of the painting is marred, burnt, but the eyes remain. They come out the strongest, and as the painter reserved the darkest black for the pupils, we are drawn into their density. How can such a black live with this pale leaf skin? Rachael Whiteread's current show at the Serpentine is much like this. She creates the hollows of things, where darkness accumulates and gives the mind a place to drop away, a place which is both immense and gently holding.
When I return home I must remember not to move through the painting process but to be in it, to sit with it, to be uncertain and work from newness.
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