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05/06/2004: "Are you Suffering from FUPA? (Frequent Uncontrollable Pallet Anxiety)"

Does this scene look familiar?

You come into your studio determined to start painting. Sitting next to your easel is a beautiful, white, virginal pallet waiting to receive your creative fluids. You pick up one tube of paint, hesitate, fingers trembling on the cap, a bead of sweat pops out on your forehead, you hastily set down the tube of paint without opening it, you pick up a different color...is this the one you want, no, the one you NEED? Again you hesitate. Now the room seems to be getting hotter and hotter. The pallet seems to be getting brighter and brighter; it's blinding you now as you sink to the floor in a quivering mass of unfulfilled artistic genius.

Some painters get hung up on looking at a blank canvas; I on the other hand, get hung up at looking at a blank pallet. It’s the getting started part that’s the worst. I have a hard time just picking up the tubes of paint and squishing them out onto the pallet surface. It's a level of commitment that, no matter how much I may want to paint, I sometimes can't push myself to do it.

Another problem is that because of the “Osiris Factor”, I can’t leave a pallet out at the end of the day or during breaks. Instead I’ve been storing them in the pantry. Then the next time I go to paint I see the pallet I was using before, and it’s all messy with little blobs of contaminated color and a mound of half-dried-out Liquin and it doesn’t look very inviting anymore.

But on the other hand, oil paints are expensive and I don’t want to waste them by just throwing the pallet away, so I tend to start a new one, leaving the old one in the pantry with the intentions that I’ll come back and use it later. ..of course, I don’t come back to use it later and all the paints dry out and I end up throwing them out several weeks later. I think this is the same psychological phenomenon as leftovers. Like I’ll keep 4 ounces of plain overcooked spaghetti noodles rather than throw them out…I’ll wait until it’s an unidentifiable mass of blue/green mold and then throwing it out doesn’t make me feel as guilty (obviously no one can fault me for not eating rotten food).

Well, it’s the same principal. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I currently have SEVEN pallets that are completely *#%!!#!. My preferred types of pallet are the ones made from layers of waxed paper on top of a cardboard pallet with a hole through the center for your thumb. I have three of those and whenever it's time to say goodbye to one of those pallets, all you have to do is rip off the top sheet of waxed paper and there's another fresh one waiting right underneath it (it was there all along).

I have two actual plastic pallets with the little round bowl areas for holding the different colors. Those only work for awhile and are more expensive when you have to throw them out. I also have sheets of Plexiglas that I use. If you buy Dick Blick’s wooden gallery frames (which I recommend, they’re a great value and really make your work look more pulled together in the end, even if you use gallery wrapped frames with painted sides) anyway the DB frames come shipped with Plexiglas which you don’t use for displaying oil paintings. Even better, the Plexiglas is covered with a thin layer of plastic to protect the surface from scratches.

This means you can use that surface as one pallet, then peel off the protective coating and use the actual Plexiglas as another pallet. I also recently started using the surface of the actual table that I use for holding the pallet. I just squirt a tiny bit of blue or white or whatever I need, right onto the wooden TV tray surface, and when I’m done, I wipe it off with a paper towel.

Another thing I've started using are the gessoed panels I bought to paint on instead of canvas. They all come shrink wrapped, and again, you can paint over the shrink wrapping and when you're finished you can just rip off the shrink wrap and you have a nice gessoed panel all shiny and ready to paint.

But seriously, I have SEVEN pallets with various amounts of half-dried paint on them stored in my pantry. I feel a little like Bluebeard with a dirty little secret. I can't even store food in there anymore as all the storage surfaces are taken up by sticky pallets and the air is rather fumy. I need help. If anyone knows a good therapist who deals with FUPA, let me know