Palettes
2014
Constantly changing, these images are derived from brief moments in creative time.
They are a behind the scenes history of my students’ palettes: their ongoing intuitive and practical choices, and their direct experiences of colour theory in practice.
From 1998 to 2024 I was a secondary school art teacher in rural Canada.
Next to the paints in my classroom there was a box of old magazines. The magazines came from community donations or had been retired from the school library. We used them as a resource for collage, or as disposable paint palettes. Students would squirt their colours from a pump in a large jug onto a magazine, then get to work. At the end of each session they would tear off the paint-soaked top page, throw it in the garbage, and return the remainder of the magazine to the box.
Around 2013 I began noticing the intriguing compositions of the palettes.
These arose as a seemingly unintended byproduct to the canvas paintings the students were creating. To my aesthetic sensibility some of these magazines palettes stood out: they had mutated from being old, discarded print media into vibrant, suggestive, and beautiful artworks, each brimming with undisclosed new meaning. Startlingly refreshing yet unconscious, random and unplanned.
I authored these photographs, and distilled a year’s worth of images into this select series. The photographs were made during the flow of class, incorporating the glare and reflections of the glossy paper and overhead fluorescent lighting into the final images. While pausing to make a photograph, the students looked at me with curiosity, even skepticism as I took pictures of their in-progress palettes. Eventually I distilled the most compelling palette photographs into a ‘magazine-like’ book and revealed it to the students. They were delighted as they could now see what I was on about in the first place.
