My daughter used my good sable brush to glue a school project
She's fifteen, she knows. It was sitting there, she needed something "precise," and now there is a crust of PVA halfway up the belly of a Raphael 8404 I have had since my atelier years. I've been soaking it for two days. It is not coming back. The point is gone and the hairs have splayed out like a broom.
The thing is I can't even shout properly because I remember being fifteen and doing exactly this to my father's things, and also because she was proud of the project, and also because a brush is a brush. But it is not only a brush. You break in a good brush over years. It learns your hand. That one knew mine.
She offered me her pocket money. I said no and then went and sat in the studio for a while feeling stupid about how much it bothered me.
Anyway. It's in the jar with the ruined ones now, the graveyard jar. If anyone has a trick for reviving a sable that has been abused with glue I will hear it, but I suspect I am just going to buy a new one and be sad about it for a week.
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The learning your hand part is the real loss, not the money. A brush that has been broken in over years carries a certain spring that a new one simply does not have, and no amount of soaking brings that back. The crust is one thing, the splay is another, but the thing underneath is that it was already yours and now it is just a brush-shaped object.
Though I would say, gently: the PVA has probably done its work by now and further soaking only softens the ferrule, which you do not want. Let it dry, keep it for glue and gesso, and buy the new one. Fifteen-year-olds do not understand that some objects are not interchangeable, and there is no way to teach that except by living long enough to lose one yourself, which she now has, in a small way, through you.
The pride in the project is the part worth keeping. Naja. The brush is gone either way.
You are right about the ferrule. Two days soaking is already more than I would give it, and every hour more is a little more rust creeping into the crimp. A brush dead from PVA is dead. Retire it to the glue pot and be done.
The one thing I would push back on is the buying. Do not rush to replace it. I have done that twice and both times the new brush sat in the jar for a year because it was not the old one, and I resented it. Let the hand forget first, then choose.
The sitting in the jar for a year, that is the part I would not have guessed. I would have bought the replacement the same week, felt virtuous about it, and then quietly avoided it. So I will take the advice. The rack is empty at that slot for now and I can live with that.
Though I admit the empty slot is its own small reproach every morning. Maybe that is the point. Let it reproach me a while.
You're right and I've stopped soaking it. It's drying on the rack now, head down and slightly ashamed of itself. It will live in the gesso pot from here on, which is a dignified enough retirement for a brush that gave me twenty years.
The spring, yes. That's the part nobody outside the trade believes. A new 8404 out of the box is a stiff little soldier and it takes months before it stops fighting you. She doesn't owe me a brush. She owes me the months. I won't tell her that, of course.