Sugar Maple Palettes carefully gathered from Beam Paint's family’s sugar bush, the place where we make maple syrup. These small pieces of wood come from the magical Inaatig in our 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 our 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. They have always loved the strength and feeling of them, like a living stone. Made 7/8 inch to fit the standard Paintstone. Shape and colour will vary. 

Beam Paints results from a multi-generational love of pigment, paint, colour, and innovation. Anong Beam was raised by 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 their 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.