The Artist’s Mind, Body and Creativity

While I was writing and researching The Artist’s Palette, I was often asked ‘Why palettes?’ and ‘Do you have any favourite palettes?’ Both are valid questions, and I have thought  a lot about the first one myself. When I looked back to all my previous work on colour – lectures, teaching sessions, exhibitions, books, essays – I noticed that I had instinctively always included palettes, either the real objects or images of how artists depicted themselves with one of the most iconic and recognizable of painting tools. I was struck by how some palettes resemble organs (hearts, kidneys, hands…) and how they often connect the artist’s body and the artwork in a composition. They are a symbol of the artist’s mind, body and creativity.

Surviving real palettes are equally fascinating when they bear the marks of an artist who used them, such as fingerprints in the paint, empty areas where a thumb rested, or scratches and breakages that speak of how the tool was used. In short, they can form a direct link to a long-dead artist and are potent visual and material storytellers. Having researched intellectual colour concepts and diagrams for many years, I realised that a palette, and the traces that are left on it, are a more human, visceral version of a colour concept.

So what about my favourite palettes then? I have many, and it is hard to choose just a few, as each one tells a different story. Some reveal much about the artist, others keep secrets, all of them are special. One of my favourites, among the last I worked on for this book, is that of Winifred Nicholson. I have long had an interest in Nicholson as a colour theorist and knew her two short but fascinating essays, ‘Unknown Colour’ (1937) and ‘Liberation of Colour’ (1944), published under the name Winifred Dacre.

Nicholson was a painter of light and luminosity. Her interest in prismatic colour found a new lease of creativity when, in the mid-1970s and in her eighties, she was given two glass prisms by the Canadian physicist Glen Schaefer, with whom she shared excited exchanges about the qualities of light and colour. She then created a series of so-called ‘prismatic paintings’, based on playful experiments with these prisms. She carried them with her in a small pouch (illustrated in the book), and referred to them as ‘very little pots of gold’.

This wooden palette probably dates from the last few years of her life, when she painted mostly sitting down in her ‘sunroom’ in Banks Head, Cumbria. In all likelihood her prisms were with her when she used this palette. The prisms allowed her to create rainbow colours instantly, and to find those liminal ‘unknown’ colours she had discussed in her essays and letters.

A key colour range in her work was pinks, violets, purples and magenta, which she had in common with many Impressionists, often in juxtaposition with yellows, creating vibrating, glowing effects. Nicholson wanted to explore the full potential of violets: ‘Those artists’, she noted in ‘Unknown Colour’, ‘who have been interested in the potency of colour have always investigated violet – though they have rarely used more than a little of its suspicious magic.’

The palette looks heavily used and has been wiped and scraped many times. It has chipped edges, and a piece of it has broken off, which is one of its mysteries. There is not a lot of paint left on it but the colours are unmistakably those used by Nicholson to paint light; and those important violets, pinks and magentas are near the thumbhole.

The Artist’s Palette is out now.

About The Artist’s Palette
The paint-loaded palettes of fifty world-renowned artists are displayed alongside the paintings the artists created using those hues, and the colours and brushstrokes employed are analysed to uncover surprising new stories about each artist and their work.