There’s something rather romantic about a painter’s palette once the painting has stopped. All that colour left behind — mixed, scraped, buried and mixed again — becomes an accidental record of decisions made elsewhere. The paintings have gone; the evidence remains.
This one has had a particularly good working life. Great passages of turquoise, violet, yellow, rose, green and ultramarine have accumulated across its surface, sometimes several layers deep. Look closely and it’s extraordinarily painterly; pull back and the whole thing begins to read as an abstract composition in its own right. Not consciously made, perhaps, but made nonetheless.
And then somebody had the rather wonderful idea of adding light.
The construction is pleasingly simple. A metal bracket mounts the palette away from the wall, creating a shallow space behind it in which the bulb sits concealed. Light is allowed to escape indirectly around the irregular edges, washing the wall in a warm halo, while the original thumb hole becomes a small, brilliant disc. Nothing on the front announces itself as a light fitting; the palette remains almost entirely intact.
The effect inevitably brings to mind that old preoccupation of painters with trying to make light out of pigment. Turner pushed paint towards something almost immaterial — colour dissolving into atmosphere and illumination. Here the process is rather charmingly reversed: instead of paint attempting to describe light, actual light emerges from behind the paint.
It’s an appealing collision of things: studio debris, found abstraction, sculpture and functional lighting. Switched off, it remains a richly worked object with all the physical pleasure of dried paint — ridges, scrapes, mixtures and little archaeological layers of colour. Switched on, the palette darkens and the light takes over, glowing around its outline and through that perfectly placed circular aperture.
The black twisted fabric cable is deliberately visible, dropping freely down the wall with an inline switch. There’s no need for hardwiring; the light simply mounts to the wall and plugs into a socket. That informality feels entirely right for it. Less a conventional wall light than a small piece of the artist’s studio that has somehow found another life.
Details
Date: Late 20th century / contemporary
Material: Artist’s wooden palette, paint, metal and electrical fittings
Dimensions: Height 35 cm × Width 25 cm × Projection 8 cm
Wiring: Black fabric-covered twisted flex with inline switch
Installation: Wall mounted; plugs directly into a standard socket
Condition
Very good found/vintage condition. The heavily worked, paint-encrusted surface is intrinsic to the piece, with scratches, dried paint, deposits and general evidence of its previous life as a working artist’s palette. The metalwork to the reverse has age and surface wear. Please refer to the photographs for detail.
Delivery
Qualifies as a smaller item. UK delivery via insured courier/FedEx at checkout; international shipping available — please get in touch for a quote.
