my palette hasn't been cleaned since March and I'm starting to think the mud is the point
ok so I have this porcelain palette, the big rectangle one, and I got it when I went full time in March as a "you're a real artist now" gift to myself. told myself I'd clean it every single session. it is now December-ish and there is a layer of dried paint in there that has its own topography. like I can see the ghost of every painting I've made this year in the mixing wells. there's a specific grey-brown in the corner from that commission that went badly, I know exactly which one.
and here's the thing, I KNOW you're supposed to work clean, my old professor would have a stroke, but I've started dipping into the old dried stuff with a wet brush and getting these colors I could never mix on purpose. like accidental neutrals. this dusty mauve that only exists because I was lazy in October. I've used it in three paintings since.
my partner keeps offering to scrub it for me as a nice gesture and I keep saying no and I can't fully explain why without sounding insane.
anyway I just spent 40 minutes mixing a green for a leaf and got it in two tries off the mud so. posting this instead of admitting anything to my professor. does anyone else hoard their palette like this or am I the only gremlin here
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the corner with the bad commission grey-brown is the whole post for me. i've got a well on my own palette that's basically a scar from a piece i ruined twice, and i keep not scraping it because it's the only honest record of that month.
working clean is overrated anyway. clean palette just means you're mixing the same three safe colors over and over. the mud is where you actually learned something.
the "ruined twice" well is what gets me. most people would've scraped that the second time out of pure spite. keeping it is a decision. that's not laziness, that's you refusing to pretend it didn't happen.
hard disagree on one thing though. "clean palette = same three safe colors" only holds if you're the type to reach for the safe three. i knew a guy who scrubbed his palette down to bare porcelain every night and still made the most unhinged work i've ever stood in front of. the mud isn't the lesson, the mud is just evidence. what you do with it is the lesson. some people need the empty well to move, some of us need the scar sitting there staring back.
either way, don't scrape it. you'll know when it's done being useful.
ok you got me, the "safe three colors" thing was me being dramatic about my own bad habits and pretending it was a universal law. fair. a guy who scrubs to bare porcelain every night and still paints unhinged stuff is honestly kind of aspirational, like that's a person with no crutches at all.
but "the mud is just evidence, what you do with it is the lesson" ok that's the actual sentence of the thread and I'm a little annoyed I didn't write it.
here's my thing though. I don't think the clean-palette guy and me are doing the same job. he's proving he can start from zero every time. I'm keeping a record because I have a genuinely bad memory for my own work and if I scrape it I'll convince myself the year was smoother than it was. the grey-brown corner is the only proof that commission happened, and it beat me, and I kept going anyway. maybe some people need the empty well and some of us need the dirty one. probably both are just coping mechanisms with better PR lol.
which one are you? do you scrape the scar well or leave it
ok "the only honest record of that month" hit me harder than it should have. ruined twice is SO specific, like the first ruin is a mistake and the second one is a choice you made anyway. what was the piece? do you still have it or did it go in the bin (or the shame pile, which is where mine go).