The Artist’s Palette

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapades looking at artists’ palettes.

Alexandra Loske, director of the Royal Pavillion in Brighton and author of books on colour, introduced her book on palettes starting by telling us how it came about. She saw palettes as a way that artists organise colour.

Her aim had been to find 50 real palettes and use these as route into talking about the artist and where possible identifying the painting for which it might have been used. She talked us through as selection of these.

However as she struggled to find 50 real palettes, she broadened this into looking at them in paintings. She talked about how artists use palettes as a symbol of their art in self-portraits.

I’ve used a photo of a palette converted into a clock that I bought a few years ago to illustrate this post and at the end of the talk it was fun for the artist, Maria Bell-Salter, who moderates the ARTscapades events and is always surrounded by her paintings on Zoom, to show us her palette.

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