Palette

In grad school I acquired a large frame on the cheap with the intention of using it as a huge palette. I was pretty proud of it and showed it to my professor. With an affected Australian accent, he said, "that's not a palette--THIS, is a palette" as he showed me a photo of his own palette, roughly the size of a dining room table.

I don't know if all that paint mixing space is truly necessary, but it sure is nice to never be offended with the site of one mixture bumping up against others. In one of his many self-portraits, you can observe Rembrandt's palette: a wooden rectangle balanced upon the artist's forearm. It wasn't critical for it to be large, as one's colors were ground on a separate slab (often by students or assistants), and the variety of hues was limited. In the nineteenth larger and more curvaceous palettes came into vogue. 100 years later Kurt Wehlte wrote

Today's painter rejects all kinds of palettes. They are for him merely an unbearable reminder of passe styles. Instead he has adopted a small steel table on casters, squeezing his tube colors onto a glass plate, which serves as a top. A drawer beneath holds his supply of tubes. Artists today find that continually holding a palette during painting is merely tiresome. 

He's right. It's rare to see someone balancing a palette today. Even among plein air painters this is becoming rare. Painting from the ground up, in Robert Henri's phrase, I find I need freedom of movement to work and step back from the canvas. But I prefer a wooden table. Steel would just seem so industrial. You'll see a slide show my palette above, filling with color as I paint.