Mel Davis

Mel Davis is a Berkeley, California based visual artist. She grew up in Montréal, graduated from Concordia University in 1998, then moved to the Bay Area to complete her Masters in Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, (2005). She is part of numerous private and public collections and is the recipient of The Canada Council For The Arts Grant and the Irene Pijoan Memorial Award for Painting.
Davis contributes Titian Nymph and Shepherd by Andreadakis, Katya Berger and John Berger
This book is first a dialogue between a daughter and a father about life, physical sensation, mortality. Both seem to listen to the other with great attention. Secondly it is the extraordinary vehicle for a series of insights into the everyday life and the art of the great Venetian master, following an uncanny incident at the large exhibition of his work staged in Venice in 1990. While attending the exhibition Katya meets an old man, who she becomes convinced can only be the ghost of the great painter. Her ‘spiritual’ visitor engages her in conversation about the minute particularities of painting some of the pictures there. She shares this experience with her father in a letter. He accepts the encounter at face value and discusses the historical background to the old man’s remarks, seeking answers to a series of evidential questions about his daughter’s encounter. From then on, the three of them, the old painter, the daughter, and the father discuss animals, Greece, fur, sexuality, the strangeness of drawing. www.meldavisstudio.com