Sugar Maple Palettes, paired with three beautiful colours, samples of st Armand handmade paper and a #4 travel brush. The palettes carefully gathered from Beam paints family’s sugar bush, these small pieces of wood come from the magical Inaatig in their Ojibwe language or Acer saccharum in Latin, finally Sugar Maple in English. Every spring they tap hundreds of these trees when the nights are freezing but the day is above zero and the sun is shining. It’s a time of getting together, hard work, and family. It doesn’t hurt the tree and this same acreage they live on has been caretaken by their families since and before the treaties of our area were signed. It takes 40 litres of sap to make one litre of maple syrup! Part of caring for the trees is carefully removing some dry branches, these palettes are made from those offcuts.

Beam Paints results from a multi-generational love of pigment, paint, colour, and innovation. I was raised by my artist parents, Carl Beam and Ann Beam, and was taught from a young age how to harvest hematite pigment in the LaCloche mountain range near our home in M'Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. Beam Paints draws on her early education in Indigenous pigment and expands it to encompass all paint traditions. A focus on high-quality pigment content creates sublime artist materials, with plastic-free packaging.