Your Palette is not a Plate

Something I notice again and again in my adult's oil painting classes is how little paint some people mix up.

A student might have a large area to cover, and yet on the palette there will be a small smudge of colour that would barely cover a postage stamp. This happens even though materials are included in the cost of the class, and even though I remind my students, more than once, that I will always find a use for the leftovers. When I point it out, they laugh - they've done it again, they say, and they can't quite explain why, even to themselves. I've found myself pondering the reason this habit is so hard to break.

I often wonder whether their reticence is really about paint at all. I wonder if it might be, in essence, about the way many of us were taught to think about waste. And, more specifically, about wasting food? Bear with me.

Many of us were brought up to be modest in how much we took, to finish everything on our plate, and to avoid looking greedy. One of my earliest memories is my grandmother forcing me to stay seated at the table in front of my leftovers, forbidden from leaving until the plate was cleared. 'Your eyes are bigger than your stomach' was a phrase I heard a lot as a child.

My grandmother was a young mother during the Second World War, and I understand that when you must work out how far your rations will stretch across a week, carelessness with food simply wasn't an option. She'd grown up through the hardships of post-war Britain in the 1920s, too, and I've no doubt there was hardship stretching back further still, through generations of ancestors who needed to ration supplies of every kind to survive. By the time those messages reached me as a child, though, taking too much had stopped feeling like a practical matter and started being presented as a character flaw.

For many of us, wanting more than the minimum can feel unsafe and that discomfort follows us into the studio, where the palette becomes a kind of plate. We're careful not to overindulge; we worry about leftovers. We scrape at the last of the paint rather than simply giving ourselves more. Once that tension is there, it shapes the work itself: the brush is never properly loaded, so the brush marks are tentative, and the paint gets stretched further than it ever wanted to go.

But what I've come to believe is that painting has more in common with cooking than with eating.

When you cook, you need enough of your ingredients to actually work with. A risotto won't turn creamy and rich if the stock is added in nervous little splashes - it needs to be given generously, ladle by ladle, until the rice has had enough to actually absorb.

Paint behaves the same way. A brush needs enough paint on it to make the kind of mark you're asking of it. A mixture needs enough volume to be adjusted and pushed around. A surface needs enough paint on it for richness and vibrancy. Where there's only a thin veil of colour, the painting looks starving. In cooking, meanness with ingredients spoils the dish. I think the same holds true in painting.

This isn't just a theory of mine. Behavioural economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their 2013 book Scarcity, found that a scarcity mindset isn't tied to the resource that created it .Once the mind learns to feel that there's never quite enough, that feeling can attach itself to almost anything, whether it's money, time, or, I'd argue, paint.

Mullainathan and Shafir also found something hopeful in their research: the scarcity mindset loosens its grip when a person builds in a small amount of deliberate slack, a surplus that exists purely to be there, rather than to be justified or accounted for. In the studio, that might be as simple as squeezing out more paint than you think you'll need, on purpose, before you've even decided what the painting wants. Let some of it go unused. Let the leftover sit there on the palette as proof that abundance didn't cost you much after all. In fact, it may have just bought you a painting you're happy with.

Materials matter, of course, and I'm not arguing for deliberate waste. But there's a kind of carefulness that stops being care and becomes restriction instead. I'm not entirely sure why I never developed that particular caution myself. I use a great deal of oil paint, and by the end of a session I'm usually covered in it, elbow to wrist and further. I sometimes wonder whether it was my big sister who saved me from it, that day in front of the unwanted food.

I'd been sitting there at the table for what felt like an eternity when my grandmother finally left the room. My sister, who had been waiting for exactly that moment, crept in and over to the window. She opened it quietly, picked up my plate, and together we threw the whole lot out, into the neighbours' bushes.

I don't know for certain that one small act of rebellion undid the potential for a lifetime of rationing my paint but I like to think it did. My sister taught me that if you take more than you need, you don't have to sit with it guiltily. You can simply let it go.

So next time, load the brush the way you'd ladle stock into a risotto, and see how much tastier your painting looks by the end.