I can remember as a child being fascinated that you could measure the age of a tree by counting the number of rings you saw through its trunk when it was cut down. It didn't take long to occur to me that to do so one had to ensure the demise of the tree. Not a bad realisation for a five year old. I was particularly fascinated by the very idea that in looking at those rings you were looking back in time, and later learning taught me that it is possible to read much about the tree's life and growth, and climatic events, from those rings. Similarly the geology of landforms and the strata that are evident when uplift or erosion occurs all tell a story about aeons long past. It was no wonder I was a Dr Who fan from that very first broadcast in Aotearoa NZ.
So yesterday I had just finished painting another batch of figures, and sat staring at my paint palette. It is (or was) a piece of glass maybe 10-15cm square that my father gave me when I started painting figures and models. I was probably around twelve years old. That piece of glass began at around 5mm thick. It was the thickness that held my gaze. I measured it .. it's now 25mm thick at its thickest.
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| The current state of my paint palette |
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| A paint pot next to the palette, for scale |
It struck me that if I looked at the underside of the palette I was looking at paint that had been laid down over 55 years ago. I was looking back in time. There is blue, and yellow, and green, and white, and grey and.... I can't recall what I might have been painting. Maybe the blue was some Airfix French Napoleonic infantry? Maybe the green was an Airfix M3 Lee/Grant tank?
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| The underside of the palette |
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| Again, for scale... |
Interesting how the mind works, isn't it. Hopefully I have a few more years of painting left in me, although I doubt enough to add another 20mm to the thickness of the palette.
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