Model behaviour

There has probably never been a wackier representation of art in the movies than the 1955 vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Artists and their models. It was the last Lewis Martin team-up and revolves around the struggles of painter  Rick Todd who has to do billboard work to keep afloat. In a parallel universe the real James Rosenquist was also a billboard painter learning the techniques that he would put into his famous Pop paintings of the early sixties. For Martin and Lewis the billboard paint job inevitably ends in spilling big tubs of the stuff on the client and a passing cop. Still, this rather sorry mess of a movie ends with a big production number on a giant palette, so not all bad. In fact the movie was presented as a satire on the paranoid delusions of the McCarthy hearings via the censorship and control of comics (Lewis is a comic nut in the movie). You can see the billboard sequence here.

Images: top to bottom left to right, Dean Martin ‘paints’ lips high above the street and James Rosenquist in action above Times Square c.1957, whoops, the palette as art signifier, again, and the small poster for the movie with obligatory palette.

Perfect storm 2

Again it's a bronze public sculpture of an artist holding paintbrushes and a palette. What's not to like.
Image: Bust of Maltese artist Mattia Preti

Great Scott!!

Three years ago we could only turn up four comic book covers that featured the Mona Lisa. Now not only does this one make it five, but we are also throwing in an artist’s palette, another of OTN’s minor obsessions. (Thanks F)

Flavour of the month

Never thought we'd get to see OTN’s love of the artist’s palette rewarded in a big box super mart. But there it was in Ely Nevada's Safeway complete with palette / palate word play.

Other palette stories on OTN
Horror palette

Real palettes

Ham Solo

Mags

And continuing the artist palette theme ...

... this handy palette found in French junk shop