Thoughts on the artist's palette

3,400-Year-Old Ancient Egyptian Painting Palette

Made out of a single piece of ivory, the artist’s palette above has six oval paint wells that still contain cakes of blue, green, brown, yellow, red, and black pigments. At the top end of the palette is also the inscription of the pharaoh Amenhotep III in hieroglyphics, coupled with the phrase, “beloved of Re.” This was an important object, and the colours within it meant something special. Painting involves making images emerge from the ground up colours of the earth and as such there is something magical about the process, so no wonder the Egyptians wanted to link this palette to Re, the god who personified the sun and who was the creator god, that brought himself and the rest of the pantheon into being at the beginning of time. He was also central to the ideology of kingship and the acolytes of Amenhotep III, would have been very aware that in identifying Re on this palette, they were linking together the concept of divine creator and the protector of the pharaonic dynasty. In such a humble object the idea of the transformative power of paint is seen as mythically important. 

There are two intertwined histories of the artist's palette. The first one is a history of the materials behind pigment production and the other one is a history of the surfaces that artists have used over the years to mix pigments on in order to get the colours and consistences needed to make their various paints. You can see what I'm getting at if you look at old palettes and how the colours are set out on them. 

Constable's lime wood palette

Rembrandt's palette

I suppose you might wonder why a blog about drawing needs to reflect on this key aspect of painting, but as I have often pointed out, drawing and painting are so inextricably linked that it is hard to separate out the aspects that belong to drawing and those that belong to painting. In this case I'm wanting to talk about an idea of mixing, of taste and the development of a shape, much of which is visualised in my mind by drawing rather than painting and I am also trying to play around with a few ideas associated with drawing as disegno. Disegno, the Italian word for drawing and design that involves both the ability to make the drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent the design, so in this case the design is that of the artist's palette, but its invention, or you might say 'the design process', is where my interest lies.

Paint set out in shells

The earliest written description of palettes is in the accounts of the Duke of Burgundy in the late 1460s, they are described as 'trenchers of wood for artists to put oil colours in and to hold them in the hand.' Medieval painters at work used pigments in shallow shells or saucers, often with a range of colours, such as those set out in the nine saucers or are they shells, of a fourteenth-century illuminated capital from an English encyclopaedia above. A trencher (from Old French tranchier 'to cut') was a type of tableware, and was the forerunner of the plate, a place where you cut food up. It was originally a flat round of usually stale bread used in a similar way to an absorbent plate. Those of you who have eaten Ethiopian food might have come across injera which can be used in the same way. By the end of the meal, the plate will have soaked up all the excess oil and juices, so that it would in effect be the pudding, eaten as a final part of dinner. The rich would give these soaked bread pieces to the poor as alms. The trencher gradually evolved into a small plate of metal or wood, typically circular and completely flat, without the lip or raised edge of a plate. Trenchers of this type are still used, for example, the cheeseboard or a food chopping board, which of course retains in its usage the original Old French, tranchier 'to cut'.

A contemporary cheeseboard

If you look at the wooden cheeseboard above, you will see that it is very similar to the palette in Marcia's left hand in the image below. I'm betting that in those days the same item might have been used for both purposes, and if you have ever had to cut a runny camembert with a cheese knife, I suspect the action would be virtually the same as cutting through a dollop of a stiff mix of oil pigment with a palette knife. 

The setting out of the palette, a portable surface upon which colours are arranged according to an artist's interest in particular tonal or colour ranges, has all sorts of implications for the way we think about painting and the main records we have of their use is from images of palettes in paintings made by artists that used them, therefore you might suppose that they were very accurate representations, as they were used by them every day. 

Marcia as both painter and sculptor

Marcia using an elongated oval palette 

Marcia using paints set out in tubs: Miniature middle 15th century

Marcia, painter: Miniature from a manuscript of Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris, France, early 15th century

Strangely some of the earliest depictions of palettes are in the hands of women painters. We tend to think that very few existed in western Europe until recently, so it is interesting to find women painters depicted in illustrations of various versions of Boccaccio's book 'Famous Women' of 1361, a chronological collection of biographies that includes women artists. For instance the artist Marcia, who is described thus:

'She devoted herself completely to the study of painting and sculpture; in the end, she was able to carve ivory figures and to paint with such skill and finesse that she surpassed Sopolis and Dionysius, the most famous painters of her day. Clear proof of this is the fact that the pictures she painted were sold for better prices than those of other artists. And what is still more extraordinary, our sources say that, not only did Marcia paint extremely well (a fairly common accomplishment), but she could paint more quickly than anyone else'. 

It is possible to guess from some palettes what medium they were using, the palette in the 15th century miniature suggesting an oil medium, a technique only just invented and unknown at the time that these women were supposed to have worked as artists. The paint on the palette of the painter in these illustrations probably has the viscosity of oil paint, which is thick and stiff, as it remains in place on an inclined surface. In this miniature, Marcia also has paints set into shells on the table next to her, their small size suggesting that they were chosen pigments decanted from a pig's bladder which was often used to store larger quantities of paint. She is perhaps using the palette more as a mixing surface than as an orderly array of colours that will help in her tonal or colour range selection, and if this was the case, the artist may have spent more time ordering the pigment filled shells when choosing their 'pallette'. Marcia is depicted as a Medieval woman but in Boccaccio's text we read that she was a Greek artist from the 1st century. The palette she uses has a long handle and she rests it against the painting she is engaged with, as she needs her free hand to hold a mirror. For myself the painting is fascinating because as well as being an early indication that women used to be taken seriously as painters, it has several layers of reality. The face in the mirror, the painted face and the side view of the artist's face, all exist at the same time, in the same reality, in effect the artist Marcia, now exists in triplicate. Marcia was also a stand in for someone else, Boccaccio based his story on a much earlier account by Pliny, who wrote about a famous female painter from ancient Greece called Iaia of Kyzikos who Pliny states, ‘painted a portrait of herself with the aid of a mirror’ which would of course have been a bronze mirror in her case. The miniature of Marcia at work from the middle of the 15th century appears to duplicate Marcia even further. The stance she paints of herself is further reflected in her sculptures, as if once she had made an image of herself, she then used it as a model for all her sculptures of women. Marcia in this way becoming an icon of reproduction, even though, or in spite of the fact that as Pliny also stated, ‘she remained single all her life’.

Boccaccio's text also celebrates the lives of two other women artists, Irene, daughter of Cratinus, who 'surpassed her master in art and fame' and Tamaris, daughter of Micon, an Athenian artist. 

Irene at work, using a similar palette to Marcia

Tamaris paints Diana

Tamaris is using a bowl to hold her paint in or a large shell, two objects that are echoes of the cupped hand. By putting our hands together we can make a hollow out of which we can scoop water up from a stream to drink. It must have been at some point very early on in human development that it was realised a shell could do this for us even more effectively and then at a much later date it would have been realised that bespoke vessels could be made out of clay. Palette's are also extensions of our bodies, in a similar way to a brush being a concept based on our fingers, which extends our capacity to paint with far more control than we could possibly achieve by smearing paint onto surfaces with our hands. I'm sure the first palette would have been the palm of the hand, I still in fact use my left palm occasionally to mix paint on when I have nothing else at hand. But our word 'palette' is derived from the French palette, which in turn comes from Old French palete, a "small shovel or blade". This in turn comes from the Latin pala "spade or shoulder blade". The shovel below was discovered during excavations at the stone circle and earthworks in Avebury, Wiltshire in 1909, and dates to between 2900 and 2600BC. It is made from the scapula (shoulder blade) of an ox.

A 5,000 year old ox shoulder blade used for digging

If you look at the palette used by Marcia in the early 15th century image, you will see it consists of a handle and a broad flat surface to lay colours out. I would suggest the form came to us as humans a while before the medieval period and at least 10,000 years before these women painters were meant to have practiced. Long before the kidney shape I'm sure the scapula was a model for the palette, a place where colours could be mixed and I'm also sure shells have been used as vessels for keeping pigments ready for use for thousands of years. 

Human scapula

I can see in the scapula the possibility of a palette and so I'm sure would early peoples. 

A contemporary kidney shaped plastic palette

This plastic palette above even has small scooped out indentations, memories of shells, set out around its perimeter. 

I have argued many times that art is inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement in this case twisted around an oval wooden board that has a hole in it for the thumb, and a shape that allows it to rest on the artist's non-painting arm and to be held in a position that allows mixing to be done easily. In the image below you can see the artist squeezing out a tube of paint onto his palette. He is surrounded by palettes of several variations of shape and size, and he is using one similar in shape to Constable's lime wood palette, whilst a kidney style palette floats above his head. I was particularly interested in the hinged palette, probably designed for the artist who has to spend a lot of time working outdoors, so would need something very portable. Notice a white palette in the selection, they had become popular in the late 19th century due to the use of white grounds for both Impressionist work and by the Pre-Raphaelites, these grounds it was agreed kept colours lighter and brighter and colours were therefore also needing to be mixed against white, so that the colour mixed on the palette looked the same as when it was laid on the white ground of the painting, hence the continuing popularity of white as a palette colour. 

Mixing on these flat boards is not that far away from cutting up and eating from a trencher. As we mix our food together with our knife and fork, we are doing something not dissimilar to the mixing of colour with a palette knife and brush. The fact that many students use disposable white paper plates as temporary palettes, showing that the plate form continues to be an ideal one for artists to use for mixing. The histories of food preparation and image making are mixed together. Charcoal would have been first sourced from fires made for cooking, the grease and fat from cooked meats would have been used as binders for early paints and as other food stuffs such as honey were introduced into diets, bee's wax would also have come into play as a pigment binder. The evolution of cooking, the mixing of different foods stuffs together in such a way that new and more interesting tastes were discovered, must have gone alongside the discovery that the berries you were eating were also a powerful colourant. A left over meal of fish that was stuck to a wooden surface used as a table to eat from, would have given someone an idea for fish glue. Once again it is in the servicing of our bodies that ideas arise and as we eat we think and digest thought as much as food. 

Think about how you lay out food around your plate. You don't just dollop it on, you carefully arrange it, often with concern for colour, but more often concern for mixing one taste with another. You will put mustard near to meat for instance, because you know a mix of the two  excites your taste buds. Is not the laying out of an artist's palette similar? As you lick the ends of your brush to ensure a fine point, perhaps you are much closer than you realise to being a colour chef or paint cook and that kidney in your hand is as much a food stuff as a mixing surface. 

The kidney with violet

Caterina Van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548

Van Hemessen has an interesting palette, she holds it at an angle that makes you think she wants to show it to us. She has a very small palette with few colours on it and there is no mixing going on. In Cennini's craftsman's handbook he states that if you wanted to paint flesh you first of all painted in a green underlayer, "Take a little terre-verte and a little white lead, well tempered; and lay two coats all over the face, over the hands, over the feet, and over the nudes." The flesh tones were applied over this underpainting. You had to make up three values of flesh colour, each lighter than the other and then you would lay each flesh colour in its place on the areas of the face and to do this the flesh tones were pre-mixed in a system of three gradations, which corresponded to the three modelling planes of light, mid-tone and dark. Blending was then done on the picture surface, rather than mixing on the palette. Cennini also describes preparing colours for painting clothing or draperies and again he tells the artist to set out a series of three basic tones onto the palette and blend afterwards.

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 1515

This is why in Niklaus Manuel Deutsch's painting of Saint Luke, the patron saint of painting, Saint Luke is using a very limited palette for painting the blue cloak of the Virgin. As in cooking, too many flavours makes it hard to get an idea of the structure of the meal, in painting too many colours could lead to a lack of formal clarity. However sometimes expression will overcome structure, and Van Gogh's palette feels more like a plate pushed aside after a hastily rushed dinner. 

Making art is about material thinking, when you use the things in this world to think with, they become extensions of your body and your mind. If you don't believe me, how do you feel if you have a minor bump in your car? You feel it directly, even though it was the car and not you that was damaged. 

Nb. A few thoughts about words. Words are interesting things in that they hold onto the edges of events and turn complex interconnected processes into simple chunks so that we can understand them, especially as nouns. But they can also develop a series of poetic associations some of which are based on homonyms. Homonyms can be homographs, (spelt the same but meaning different things) or homophones, (sounds the same but means different things) or both. Even though you know these words stand for different things, because they sound the same, your instinctive self feels that there must be some sort of connection between them. Set out below are a few palette/pallet/palate meanings.  

A “palette” as we have just seen is the flat board an artist mixes paint on, and by extension it also means a range of colours, as in, "The artist's palette consisted of reds, greens and blues" and it is associated with the tools of the artist, such as a palette knife. Derived from the French palette, which in turn comes from Old French palete, a "small shovel or blade". This in turn comes from the Latin pala "spade or shoulder blade". 

A “pallet” is a type of bed made of straw or hay, used in medieval times. Close to the ground, it was generally a linen or some other material sheet stretched over some hay or straw. The mattress might be called a palliasse, or sometimes pallet, based on the French word for straw: paille. 

A pallet is also a wooden platform used as a base for storing and shipping large items. This word is also derived, like the artist's palette, from the Middle French 'palette' (literally, “small shovel”). This small shovel has led to a variety of mixed meanings. Hence, a pallet was also a flat flexible wooden blade, an instrument with a handle used by potters for shaping. There is a related original sense in English which was medical, such as a pallet being "a flat instrument for depressing the tongue." These are now however called spatulas and are normally made of wood. However as we have seen a palette knife is designed to clean and scrape your artist palette and it has a straight blade made from metal with a wooden handle or plastic with a flexible blade. However a spatula can also be used to mix your paint and is usually described as a flat thin implement used especially for spreading or mixing soft substances. 

A spatula for tongue depression

A spatula for cooking

A spatula set, comprising of three palette knives.

A spatula is any tool with a blade that is somewhat flexible, but fairly rigid, so in effect a palette knife is a type of spatula. However a 'palette' is a “small shovel” which could look very like the wooden spatula used for cooking. Gradually 'pallet' became the spelling for a "large portable tray" like a cheese board and in extension, eventually becoming the spelling for the usually wooden flat crate like support used with a forklift truck for moving loads.

Pallet

In heraldry a pallet is a vertical stripe, half as wide as a pale. 

Pallet

Pale

The palate is divided into the hard bony palate and the fleshy soft palate. The palate is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals and it separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. This derives from the Old French palat and directly from Latin palatum "roof of the mouth," also "a vault," which is perhaps of Etruscan origin [Klein], but de Vaan suggests an IE root meaning "flat, broad, wide." It was popularly considered to be the seat of the sense of taste, hence transferred meaning "sense of taste" (late 14c.), a term also used in this way in classical Latin. 

Words begin to loosen their hold the more you play with them, and it is useful be be reminded that they are a convention for shared meaning and in no way have any relationship to reality. 

See also:

Artist's bridges and mahlsticks

Making your own drawing tools

The finger and mobile phone screens

Drawing Devices

More drawing devices

Drawing and ritual: Leeds City Art Gallery

Roger Ackling: Bird: Sunlight on wood 1974

There is an exhibition of work at the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International, that you might easily walk past and not notice, as it concerns small discrete objects that were used as part of three artists' performative works and personal rituals. This small self contained exhibition looks at the work of artists that made their reputations during the 1970s, and therefore I was very interested in how their various sensibilities overlapped with my own, as they emerged as artists at exactly the same time as myself.
I was particularly interested in the work of Roger Ackling. For much of his career he made work using a magnifying glass to focus bright sunlight onto the surface of found wooden objects, and in the process burning lines and dots, which for him became a sort of meditative mark making. The wood he used was usually found, often on a beach, but it could be from anywhere, and his only tool was the magnifying glass. He in this way was able to re-assert the position of the sun as central to all things seen. His work reminds us of the power of the sun to transmit energy to the Earth and in doing so power vegetable, animal and mineral life. These small drawings on wood, are objects that have a sensibility that could have been arrived at thousands of years ago. I was reminded of constructions like Stonehenge and Newgrange, constructions that were also celebrations of the sun, but on a larger scale. There is a lot of hand eye co-ordination and control in his drawings. Each line positioned very carefully in relation to the others, until a perfectly formed rhythmic surface is developed. 

Roger Ackling

Ackling's friend Richard Long tells of Ackling suggesting driving to Cornwall trailing a pencil on a piece of string on the road, and returning by the same route trailing a rubber. This was back in 1968, a time when Ackling had already developed a minimalist sensibility, one that would find full expression in the use of a magnifying glass and forgotten wooden fragments. It is also worthwhile thinking about the fact that in making work of this sort he was dealing with sustainability issues well before they were seen as essential.

Keir Smith made drawings in an indirect way, as part of a method of investigating his subject matter and developing ideas. In the early 1980s Smith began to start turning process into performance, creating a series of sculptures and installations as a way of documenting his interaction with the landscape.

Keir Smith

Keir Smith

Smith at one point was making drawings by using metal stencils and then scorching or burning images through the stencils onto paper. The stencils were kept in special handmade leather pouches, which were worn by the artist as a sort of tool belt, the perfomative act and associated equipment being just as important as the drawings that emerged from the process.

Every profession has its tool kit, leather belts designed to carry as wide a range of tools as possible have always been excellent aids for performance artists as much as make-up artists.

Probably the most well known image of an artist carrying his kit out of the studio is this one of Courbet, notice the roll of canvas, folded easel and stretcher bars

Martin Rogers was known for his artist's books as well as a wide ranging idiosyncratic practice. The present exhibition presents some of his drawings for objects as well as the objects themselves. These objects are made beautifully as if by a cabinet maker and they suggest that they have emerged from a society that used them for complex rituals, rituals that in particular would involve some sort of rhythmic sound making. The drawings on display show Rogers thinking through the various possibilities and forms that these objects could possibly have, as well as visualising their making process. 

Martin Rogers 

All three artists had a performative aspect to their work and to some extent this exhibition of objects and drawings misses the point that these artists were trying to make. The boundaries between art and life were becoming blurred, artists such as Alan Kaprow were very influential at this time, his "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to what would be called performance art, and his essays set out a series of approaches to understanding the paradoxical relationship between art and life and the nature of meaning. The putting of this type of work behind exhibition glass, if we are not careful, re-introduces the divide between how we think about life and how we experience it. 

The other artist that I remember being of vital importance at this time was Robert Smithson, the detail below of a drawing of stars from one of Keir Smith's drawings in particular reminded me of Smithson's cosmological approach. Smith's drawing of a drawing held down by stones, suggests that the artist should be making drawings out in the landscape and not in the studio, especially as in this case, if the drawing is of star patterns seen at night. 

If we take a typical work by Robert Smithson, such as his ‘St. John in the Desert’, whereby an old engraving of St John is surrounded by collages of electrical diagrams, force-fields and other technical readouts from science manuals and place it next to his essay on Robert Morris; we can think of these two visual/written texts as containing ideas that could flow between each other, intellectual energy at times being converted into electrical flow and vice versa. This perhaps gives an idea of how Smithson's influence worked at the time. 

Robert Smithson: St John in the Desert

This is a short extract from Smithson’s essay on Robert Morris.

'Descartes' cosmology is brought to a standstill. Movement in Morris's work is engulfed by many types of stillness: delayed action, inadequate energy, general slowness, an all over sluggishness. The ready-mades are, in fact, puns on the Bergsonian concept of "creative evolution" with its idea of "ready made categories." Says Bergson, "The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure." But it is just such an "impossibility" that appeals to Duchamp and Morris. With this in mind, Morris's monstrous "ideal" structures are inconsequential or uncertain ready-mades, which are definitely outside of Bergson's concept of creative evolution. If anything, they are uncreative in the manner of a 16th-century alchemist-philosopher-artist. C.G. Jung's writing on "The Materia Prima" offers many clues in this direction. Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness. In this context, Duchamp and Morris may be seen as artificers of the uncreative or decreators of the Real. They are like the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, who "gave up painting to become an alchemist." This might help us to understand both Judd's and Morris's interest in geology. It is also well to remember that Parmigianino and Duchamp both painted "Virgins," when they did paint. Sydney Freedberg observed in the work of Parmigianino, if not in fact, at least in idea'.

There was a sort of ‘hippy’ feeling to all this, and one that for many artists at this time, myself included, seemed a positive and morally uplifting direction to take. That desire for everything to be joined up, for an invisible universe that lay behind this everyday world to be revealed in all its complex glory, was I remember vitally important to the rise of conceptualism. We move in Smithson’s essay from Duchamp, through Descartes, touching on Jung and use a late Renaissance painter as a touchstone that can take us into the world of alchemy. Smithson goes on to examine the nature of thermodynamics and then reflect on the structure of time. Old myths and religious beliefs, as rethought by Joseph Campbell were for our generation as important as the more technological writings of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller invented the term 'ephemeralization' or the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." At the time there was a high degree of optimism that science would soon be fused with some sort of mythic understanding of universal principles and that what used to be called 'magic' was simply some sort of future science. Perhaps we need a dose of that optimism again, and seeing the work of these now all dead artists of my own generation reminded me that art and life always need to be entwined together. 

Every now and again I review an exhibition in the City Art Gallery that I think expands or deepens an idea of what drawing is concerned with, as a reminder to keep going and checking out what is being presented. There will always be a wide range of other approaches to art making represented, at the moment there is an excellent exhibition 'Woodwork' to see, that includes work from various historical periods and from non western cultures. It is easy to ignore something just because it is on your doorstep, make sure you make full use of an excellent local resource. 

Find out what's on here: Leeds Art Gallery  
What's on at the Tetley, where there is another excellent exhibition on at the moment. 

Some earlier posts reflecting on what could be seen in the city art gallery:

Beuys and Cotman
Sculptors' Drawings
Narrative Objects
A gallery presentation of large drawings