I extremely dislike using small brushes. Okay, let's face it, I hate using them! I'm not really sure why, I just know that generally when I'm in the process of painting, I try to do as much as I can with the biggest brush possible. I will pick up a small round synthetic if there isn't any other way to grab a significant detail. Few artists like painting with brights (small square shaped brushes). Most prefer flats (long square shaped brushes) or filberts (long semi round shaped brushes). I recently switched from using brights to using flats, to try and get more paint on the canvas. But I miss my Brights because I could use the corner of the brush to lay in a detail which would save me from reaching for the dreaded small brush.
    I guess small is a relative term. Since most of my paintings fall in the small to medium category a large brush for me would be a size 6(about half an inch). There are some artists who will use an inch wide brush on an eight by ten inch canvas. At this stage in my developement I'm more interested in getting the "big picture" to look and feel right. I've done some cast drawing and painting and the mind set is to proceed from the general to the specific to the point where you are "on the form". In other words you are looking for disruptions in the surface texture that translate into micro forms. In my paintings my hope is that if I get the value and color and edges right that there will appear to be a lot more of that going on than there actually is, and I'll be able to skip right past the whole "getting on the form " thing without ever having to have used a small brush. Don't laugh, I'm not kidding, I'm naming a new phobia after a fear of using small brushes." Micro-phobia"
     Perhaps Velasquez was a micro-phobic. Legend has it that he used long three foot handles on his brushes so that he could gage the effects of his tones from a viewing distance while actually painting them. It sounds kind of like sight-size painting without having to log the miles. And of course with Velazquez, less is definitely more. His paintings will make you see details that are definitely not there. Kind of like a blurry topograhical map. If you squint your eyes all of a sudden you can see the mountain tops. Chardin is another artist who may have had micro-phobia. At times he will include a crack in a table or a chippped stone, sometimes even signing his name as a trompe-loeile carving, but generally his paintings seem broadly painted. Vermeer's figures are very often patches of tones, sometimes with very little blending, that fuse together brilliantly when viewed from the proper distance. Am I alone in disliking Vermeer's little pointillist flourishes, supposedly inspired by the camera obscura, where his highlights dissolve into miniature Seurats?. Maybe it's just my dislike of small brushes and small brushstrokes. Speaking of Seurat, him and I would never have gotten along. There he would be with his little pots of colors and his teeny little brushes all laid out and I would be bristling (pun intended) with contempt. Or not. The fact is I really love Seurat and the great German Renaissance painters and Gregory Gillespie and tempera painting but I just personally hate painting with REALLY SMALL BRUSHES!