I let a student scrape my palette
Small thing. A student of mine, twenty-three, spent the whole session watching me mix instead of painting her own canvas. I got a bit sharp about it, then felt bad, then understood what she was actually looking at: the palette itself. Twenty years of dried layers on that wood, a crust of cadmiums and umbers you could chip off with a knife. She asked if she could scrape a piece away to keep.
I said yes. She put it in an envelope.
I have been teaching for a long time and mostly it is correction, correction, correction. Somebody wanting my garbage because it is proof that the paint was mixed by a hand is not a thing I expected to feel so good about. I came home and looked at the thing properly for once. It is ugly. It is also the closest thing I have to a diary.
Chip away at your own palette. Somebody will want the pieces eventually.
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That's a lovely thing to have happen. I've got a plastic palette I've never once cleaned properly and my kids think it's gross, so I'm a little jealous of the wood one. The part about her wanting proof the paint was mixed by a person really gets me though. I came back to painting in my 30s after years away and I still catch myself looking at other people's messy palettes more than their finished work. You can learn more from the crust than the canvas sometimes.
The crust really does tell you more. I can look at someone's palette and guess how they paint before I see a single thing they've made, whether they mix clean or mud-wrestle, whether they're patient or in a hurry. Coming back to it in your 30s is its own thing, you've got an adult's eye now and none of the teenage panic about getting it right. The kids thinking it's gross is honestly a good sign, means it's been used.
The mud-wrestlers, yes. You can tell in ten seconds whether someone rinses their brush between values or just keeps pushing until it is all one grey. I am not sure it is a moral failing but I have my suspicions.
The adult's eye point is the one I keep coming back to. I painted better at twenty-three in some ways, more fearless, but I did not know what I was looking at. Now I look slower. Slower is worth more than I thought it was.
And the kids being disgusted is the best part. A palette that has never frightened anyone has not been used.
Plastic is fine, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's the crust that matters, not the wood. Though I admit I'd defend that old palette with my life at this point, it's basically a diary nobody can read.
And yes, the palette tells you the truth the canvas is trying to hide. You see where somebody got impatient, where they kept scraping back into the same grey. That's the whole education, right there. Coming back to it in your thirties is no small thing either. What got you back to it?