I keep the palette knife I hate because the good one is too forgiving
There is a knife in my box, a cheap thing I bought in 2009 at a shop near the Saône that no longer exists, and the blade has gone soft at the tip from too many years of scraping. I use it for mixing only. It drags, it leaves ridges in the pile, and that is the point.
I had a beautiful knife once, a real one, balanced, flexible, and it lied to me constantly. Every mixture came off it looking harmonious. Then on the canvas the whole thing separated into mud by the afternoon. The ugly knife makes me work the color longer, and by the time it is smooth on the palette it is actually smooth. Voilà.
The good knife lives in a drawer now. I am not proud of this, it is not a philosophy, it is just what happened after too many ruined greys.
Right now the pile I am fighting is a warm shadow for a woman's neck, and it keeps going pink on me. Cadmium red is a tyrant.
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The knife as lie detector. I know this, though my version is brushes. There is one flat I keep that has lost half its hairs and I cannot mix a clean pile with it, so I mix longer, and the longer mixing is where the color actually happens. The good tools let you stop too early because the surface of the pile already looks right.
But I would push a little on the knife being "ugly" as the cause. I think it is not the ugliness that teaches you, it is that you have known this thing for fifteen years and you trust what it tells you. A new cheap knife would drag the same way and you would not listen to it. The scraping, the soft tip, that is a record of your own hand over time. That is the part you cannot buy back, and it is why the balanced one lies, it has no history with you yet.
Genau. The tool is not honest or dishonest by nature. It is honest because you have worn it into honesty.
This talk of the tool telling you the truth is good, ji. But I am thinking it is not the tool only, it is the hand that has learned to obey it.
In our painting we grind the colours ourselves, and for black we use lamp soot with gum. The first years I would think the paste is ready when it looks black and smooth. My mother would say no, keep grinding. The colour is not ready when it looks ready, it is ready when the hand is tired. A new stone, a new muller, it makes no difference, the grinding is the same. What changes is that after many years your own wrist knows when to stop believing the eye.
So I agree with you that fifteen years is the thing. But the old ugly tool, it is also a record of those years. Both are true I feel.
The tired hand, yes. That is the whole thing and I am glad someone said it before me.
I have done it with lead white, the old stack process, and my teacher would watch me and say nothing, and then when I thought it was done he would say "again." Not because it needed it. Because he wanted to see if I would stop when the eye was satisfied or when the work was. Those are two different moments and they are almost never the same moment.
The tool teaches, but the tool is stupid. It only knows what the hand has taught it to feel. Your mother was giving you the years, not the soot. C'est ça.
You're right, and I'll take the correction. It is not the ugliness, it is the fifteen years. A new bad knife is just a bad knife. This one has been in my hand long enough that I read it the way you read a flat you've worn down yourself. If I bought its twin tomorrow I'd probably ignore it.
Though I'd say the ugliness is how I know which one to trust. If it were pretty I'd have replaced it.