Today I had another lightbulb moment. I was looking for a mindless task to while away Election Day and decided to do some studio tidying. My eyes fixed on my tatty old studio palette, faithful servant for the 20ish years that I've been a painter. Every now and then I've tried a new palette , and they've all ended up in the "one day" box . Old Faithful may be cracked, dirty and well used, but it has the right number of wells! It's really annoying to begin laying out paint in a pristine new palette only to realise that there aren't enough spaces for your favourite colours.
But lately I've been feeling that there's something not quite right with OF.and today I finally realised what the problem was.
Over the years as an artist I've abandoned some pigments in favour of others, so out with the old and in with the new ,BUT, and this is the really important bit, the new colours are not always exactly like the old ones. The new red may lean towards blue rather yellow , the new yellow may tend towards orange etc etc so, putting the new colour in the old space has thrown my colour wheel out of sync. Just think how you'd feel if someone suddenly changed your alphabet to ABCEFDGIHKJLMOPNQSRTRVWZYX or swapped your piano keys around. You intuitively reach for something and it's the wrong thing.
So today, while I waited to hear who is at the helm for the next three years, I've scrubbed out all of the old paint from my palette , carefully sorted my pigments into the correct colour order and restocked with new paint. Luckily no one called in because it was a very messy business.
I've just finished and Robbie brought me in a cup of tea... looked at my clean OF palette and said " maybe it's time you threw it away and got a new one!"
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