In the scene from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco showing the creation of Adam, we see God reaching out His hand to give Adam the spark of life. Michelangelo could just as easily have painted Adam holding a brush giving the spark of life to an empty canvas. Not that I'm saying artists are God-like in any way, but there is some kind of magic that takes place between the brush and the canvas. It's probably for that reason that artists are so particular about the types of brushes that we use.
I like a long handled brush. I like to hold it at the very tip when I'm working broadly and then choke up on it a little bit when I need to get in close. Velasquez is said to have favored brushes attached to three foot long handles. I guess the idea being that he could gauge the overall effect without the necessity of constantly stepping back. Most of the old masters used round brushes, square tips being a relatively new idea. Parkhurst recommends using bristle brushes so that one doesn't get caught up in too much niggling over detail. I've used bristle brushes for quite a long time, but I don't feel that they are of the same quality that might have been around in Parkhurst's day. I think if he had to use what passes for bristle these days he might switch over to synthetics, a change I've recently made myself.
Dan Thompson has a 30 minute demo clip on American Artist that features a very unusual brush technicque. When laying in his first coat, he holds two brushes in one hand, sort of at right angles to each other. One is used to put paint on and the other is used to remove paint or adjust lines. He kind of resembles a bull parrying a matador. After watching the video I tried it out on a small painting, and it was kind of cool but ultimately not for me, after all there's only one Dan Thompson. In terms of experimenting, Rembrandt has to be high on the list. In one painting he will have passages of subtle refinement, heavy application and gouge marks made with the handle of his brush. It is also said that he wasn't averse to putting the paint on with his fingers.
At the Grand Central Academy of Art where I've been studying cast drawing and now cast painting, pretty much everyone paints with rounds on smooth linen canvas. When I knew I was going to be getting to cast painting I decided to start doing some paintings using small rounds so that I wouldn't be going into it without some prior experience. That was probably a good idea because initially I had no idea how to paint with a round brush. Most of my experience was with flats, brights and more recently filberts. What I liked about those brushes was that I could really push the paint around. I would take the tip of the brush and scoop it under the paint when I wanted to lay on an extra thick passage. I once read a quote, I think it was by David Leffel that the artists' brush should never touch the canvas without some paint on it, and that's the way that I've always worked. When I want to blend a passage or connect values I don't take a dry brush and fan them together, I mix the intermediary value and lay it in, and I'll keep tiling in values until I get the effect that I'm after. So when I switched to rounds I was fumbling around trying to do my old tricks without too much success.
I had once read somewhere that the advantage of painting with a round brush was that you had several options in the same brush; you could make a broad stroke, or use the tip when you needed a line or a detail. The problem I was having was that I couldn't see how to use the darn things to make a broad stroke. When I was just beginning my first cast painting, I was fumbling around with the tip, laying down one mini stroke next to another. Fortunately my instructor didn't let me get too far before coming over and giving me a little demonstration. That's when I had an "aha" moment. He was pretty much painting as I had always painted, broadly at first and then gradually refining, but he was getting the broad strokes by pushing down on the brush until the heel (near the ferrule) of the brush deposited the paint in a wider mark. Once I saw that it didn't take me too long to get the hang of it. The difference is that when you're painting in this way you have to go just a bit slower and make each stroke thoughtfully. The nice thing is that the strokes tend to automatically blend a little as you go so you don;t need to do as much noodling.
When I was looking to buy some round brushes and I was trying to decide which kind to buy, I would go to various artists websites and see what they recommended. Quite a few recommended using sable. I've painted with sable in the past and I didn't really like it. And besides they're expensive and don't seem to last very long. Eventually I ended up on the website of the Ryder Studio School. Tony uses Raphael synthetic rounds, which the company actually recommends for acrylic paint. I'm a great admirer of his paintings so I figured I'd try them out. They have the weirdest tip of any brush that I've ever seen. They have this blunt center point surrounded by flagged hairs that curl towards the tip. It's a wild looking idea that somehow actually works. The tip seems to keep coming back to find it's center no matter how much you beat the heck out of it. You'll know you need a new brush when the hairs eventually go limp, but they will not splay. Awesome. They aren't inexpensive but they do seem to last longer than the average brush and they may be made for acrylics but they work great with oils. They hold the paint well and give nice, crisp strokes.
So as you can see, I've found a brush that I really like. I went to Utrecht to pick up a few the other day and the display case was out of my size. I asked the salesman if he had any stock. After about a twenty minute wait he tells me that not only does he not have any stock but that he won't be getting any more in because they were being discontinued. Aaargh! Could this be true? I jumped in my car and hustled over to Pearl paint. They had only two brushes left in their display case and they were badly damaged. At this point I'm freaking out. Am I going to have to be like Elaine Benis, buying out all the available brushes I can find on the internet, trying to decide if a painting is "brush-worthy"? I can't have a lot of brushes all at one time. I'll go through them too quickly. I need to have one brush at a time so that I can squeeze the life out of it. If I have three dozen brushes in my studio they'll be gone in a week. I even mark my newer brushes with tape so I don't pick up a used up one by mistake. Since Pearl's was also out of them I decided to go with some other artist recommended brushes. Sadie Jernigan Valeri recommends an inexpensive white sable round so I grabbed one or two of those and Ryder also uses W&N university white rounds. I also remembered using a Robert Simmons synthetic sable in the past that I kind of like, which is made specifically for oils, so we'll see what happens, but ultimately what I really crave is those Raphaels so be warned if you go to order them and find they're out of stock; I may have a closet full of them and maybe you just aren't brush-worthy.:)
