Today I finished two paintings with ink and gouache.
My bottle of ink was bought a few years ago from a Buddhist craft shop, and is now wrapped in the khaki cotton fabric that was once a pair of shorts that belonged to an ex boyfriend. A rubber band keeps the fabric wrapped around it, like a holy shroud or a blanket. The ink is sick or cold. It leaks. It smells like mud.
I keep a family of paintbrushes in a brass plant pot than an ex girlfriend bought for me. Every plant I ever tried to grow in it died, so now it is just houses the paraphernalia that co-create an infinite visual language with me.
I know the paintbrushes well. Three of them are the first professional quality brushes I ever owned, given to me in a wooden box of watercolour paints for my sixth birthday. Over the decades the tips of their bristles have fuzzed and curled outwards a little, making their linework unkempt. I admire that they have aged ungracefully.
There is the tall yellow soft filbert hog brush I bought from a small art supply shop in Beijing, where I was stared at by people and by the empty sclera of a plethora of white plaster portrait busts staring down from a high shelf. The tall yellow soft filbert hog brush makes beautiful transparent washes and can also take a big load of pigment. It can work soft curves. It has a sturdiness and grace.
There is the impossibly thin, long and wise black script brush who my father found somewhere. I used to run sweet long licks of black ink with it, linework far finer than what a pen can achieve. These days the ink clumps to its heel and then drips unexpectedly onto the paper.
I don't begrudge the brush this new tendency, I appreciate that it learnt how to cry.
There is the thinning fan-shaped sable, who belonged to my grandfather before it belonged to my father before it belonged to me. It's bristles clump and it scratches out barcodes of ink. I enjoy it's unpredictable and pertinacious character. I have to be in a carefree state of mind to enter it's company.
There are three beautiful relatively new tall thin synthetic script brushes whose plastic hats I have kept to protect their long fibers. They demarcate contours. They respond to the slightest alterations of pressure. They don't argue.
There is the small tribe of cheap round taklon brushes pilfered from my old high school art room. They witnessed conceptual and technical evolutions. So much angst and confusion was siphoned through them that they are exhausted and a bit frayed. Now I only use them to create blobby visual puns, they want humour in their old age.
There is the big crow feather who towers above the rest, with the mysteriously trimmed barbs (I suspect mites) and truncated shaft. I used it once, dipped in black drawing ink. It mostly performs a shamanistic role, channeling the transcended spirit of the dead bird it came from (that sentence was purely poetic and holds no spiritual value).
There are those brushes whose efficacy has decreased with abuse, those brushes who were made for acrylics but are always wet with the residue of oil paint, those brushes who are mummified in a globular grey latex cocoon of masking fluid. These brushes are beyond repair but remain memorialised in the brass pot.
There are the two dorky wide housepaint brushes with their stainless steel ferrules. Used on canvas and wood, they make up for their lack of elegance in their efficiency. They know what their job is and they never fail to perform.
There is the second hand toothbrush. Once used for cleaning the tiny bones in my mouth, it was repurposed as a tool for applying thin directional sprays of ink. It never really sunk into this role. Social conditioning can be hard to break through.
There is the soft squirrel haired size 25 Roymac who was made in France, with nothing but a thick metal staple through it's ferrule: undoubtedly the cause of it's notoriously falling out hairs. I use it for laying gold leaf and pouncing patterns. I also use it for sensory gratification by softly brushing it over my cheek (also how I show it my forgiveness for leaving it's hairs embedded in my artworks).
The brushes with once white bristles have been stained not only with pigment but with the memories of what they made. I glance at them and see the shade of a face we made together.
The once sky-blue handle is mottled with puckering dried cream coloured paint pockmarks, the nicely varnished wooden handle is wedded in a ring of paper tape, scratched up and bespeckled with gold. They are tarnished and used. It feels good to be used.
Then there are the palette knives, bent rusty arrows, corroding not from neglect but from the oxidization brought on by consistent washing. I still remember my fathers, it was only six months old before it developed a jagged hole in it's metal tongue. He didn't have a painting practice until I was 15 years old, when his best friend died. Then for six months my dad painted prodigiously, then he got sick and died too. We have a heavy box of his A3 paintings, all slightly crude and depressing but that belie an undaunted exploration of layering.
I have a bee hive that I keep pencils, charcoal and pastels in. The colony who once lived there was tended by my best friend's grandmother, who also sat on local council and who was a fantastic gardener.
I have an apple crate of paints, adhesives, fixatives and liquid mediums: all of them presents from friends and strangers. Just yesterday a man at a garage sale gave me a box of gouaches at no charge.
My tiny easel was bought second hand from a college friend, it boasts her splatters and drips. A sweet reminder of her strength and doggedness as she has battled through to the other side of cancer.
The last of my tools that I will speak of are the innocuous tiny white shiny stoneware dishes. They have been blackened and washed and blackened and washed innumerable times. They always come through pure and smooth, even if ink has been caked on them for months - with a little hot water and love they come clean. They are so simple, so willing to be of service and so unattached to that service that they are monks.
I have never put into words or fully recognised my gratitude for these objects. I recently moved house twice, and the brushes sat on my lap on each journey to a new home. They are special to me.
My bottle of ink was bought a few years ago from a Buddhist craft shop, and is now wrapped in the khaki cotton fabric that was once a pair of shorts that belonged to an ex boyfriend. A rubber band keeps the fabric wrapped around it, like a holy shroud or a blanket. The ink is sick or cold. It leaks. It smells like mud.
I keep a family of paintbrushes in a brass plant pot than an ex girlfriend bought for me. Every plant I ever tried to grow in it died, so now it is just houses the paraphernalia that co-create an infinite visual language with me.
I know the paintbrushes well. Three of them are the first professional quality brushes I ever owned, given to me in a wooden box of watercolour paints for my sixth birthday. Over the decades the tips of their bristles have fuzzed and curled outwards a little, making their linework unkempt. I admire that they have aged ungracefully.
There is the tall yellow soft filbert hog brush I bought from a small art supply shop in Beijing, where I was stared at by people and by the empty sclera of a plethora of white plaster portrait busts staring down from a high shelf. The tall yellow soft filbert hog brush makes beautiful transparent washes and can also take a big load of pigment. It can work soft curves. It has a sturdiness and grace.
There is the impossibly thin, long and wise black script brush who my father found somewhere. I used to run sweet long licks of black ink with it, linework far finer than what a pen can achieve. These days the ink clumps to its heel and then drips unexpectedly onto the paper.
I don't begrudge the brush this new tendency, I appreciate that it learnt how to cry.
There is the thinning fan-shaped sable, who belonged to my grandfather before it belonged to my father before it belonged to me. It's bristles clump and it scratches out barcodes of ink. I enjoy it's unpredictable and pertinacious character. I have to be in a carefree state of mind to enter it's company.
There are three beautiful relatively new tall thin synthetic script brushes whose plastic hats I have kept to protect their long fibers. They demarcate contours. They respond to the slightest alterations of pressure. They don't argue.
There is the small tribe of cheap round taklon brushes pilfered from my old high school art room. They witnessed conceptual and technical evolutions. So much angst and confusion was siphoned through them that they are exhausted and a bit frayed. Now I only use them to create blobby visual puns, they want humour in their old age.
There is the big crow feather who towers above the rest, with the mysteriously trimmed barbs (I suspect mites) and truncated shaft. I used it once, dipped in black drawing ink. It mostly performs a shamanistic role, channeling the transcended spirit of the dead bird it came from (that sentence was purely poetic and holds no spiritual value).
There are those brushes whose efficacy has decreased with abuse, those brushes who were made for acrylics but are always wet with the residue of oil paint, those brushes who are mummified in a globular grey latex cocoon of masking fluid. These brushes are beyond repair but remain memorialised in the brass pot.
There are the two dorky wide housepaint brushes with their stainless steel ferrules. Used on canvas and wood, they make up for their lack of elegance in their efficiency. They know what their job is and they never fail to perform.
There is the second hand toothbrush. Once used for cleaning the tiny bones in my mouth, it was repurposed as a tool for applying thin directional sprays of ink. It never really sunk into this role. Social conditioning can be hard to break through.
There is the soft squirrel haired size 25 Roymac who was made in France, with nothing but a thick metal staple through it's ferrule: undoubtedly the cause of it's notoriously falling out hairs. I use it for laying gold leaf and pouncing patterns. I also use it for sensory gratification by softly brushing it over my cheek (also how I show it my forgiveness for leaving it's hairs embedded in my artworks).
The brushes with once white bristles have been stained not only with pigment but with the memories of what they made. I glance at them and see the shade of a face we made together.
The once sky-blue handle is mottled with puckering dried cream coloured paint pockmarks, the nicely varnished wooden handle is wedded in a ring of paper tape, scratched up and bespeckled with gold. They are tarnished and used. It feels good to be used.
Then there are the palette knives, bent rusty arrows, corroding not from neglect but from the oxidization brought on by consistent washing. I still remember my fathers, it was only six months old before it developed a jagged hole in it's metal tongue. He didn't have a painting practice until I was 15 years old, when his best friend died. Then for six months my dad painted prodigiously, then he got sick and died too. We have a heavy box of his A3 paintings, all slightly crude and depressing but that belie an undaunted exploration of layering.
I have a bee hive that I keep pencils, charcoal and pastels in. The colony who once lived there was tended by my best friend's grandmother, who also sat on local council and who was a fantastic gardener.
I have an apple crate of paints, adhesives, fixatives and liquid mediums: all of them presents from friends and strangers. Just yesterday a man at a garage sale gave me a box of gouaches at no charge.
My tiny easel was bought second hand from a college friend, it boasts her splatters and drips. A sweet reminder of her strength and doggedness as she has battled through to the other side of cancer.
The last of my tools that I will speak of are the innocuous tiny white shiny stoneware dishes. They have been blackened and washed and blackened and washed innumerable times. They always come through pure and smooth, even if ink has been caked on them for months - with a little hot water and love they come clean. They are so simple, so willing to be of service and so unattached to that service that they are monks.
I have never put into words or fully recognised my gratitude for these objects. I recently moved house twice, and the brushes sat on my lap on each journey to a new home. They are special to me.
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