the neem twig brush my grandmother taught me to make
I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try.
When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers.
Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂
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This really stayed with me. I think about this a lot in my own work, how the tool itself carries a kind of memory, or a way of working that's embedded in how it's made. A store brush is just a brush. But a neem twig you've shaped with your own mouth? That's different. It forces a different rhythm, a different relationship with the line.
I work in printmaking and I've been thinking about this idea of the "imperfect" tool, the one that won't hold much, that makes you work in short, deliberate gestures. There's something in that limitation that opens things up, no?
Do you find the neem twig changes how you see the drawing before you even start? Because you know you can only do so much before you have to dip again. I wonder if that restraint becomes part of the image.
Yes, you have understood it exactly. The imperfect tool, yes. You cannot rush with the neem twig. It forces you to be patient, to sit with the line as it comes. And because you must dip so often, you have time between each stroke to think, what should come next, where the line should go. The store brush, it lets you run away too fast.
In Mithila painting also, we say the brush is not just for applying colour. The brush itself is part of the ritual. My grandmother would say a prayer before she made a brush. I do not do that every time, I am not so devout as her, but sometimes, when I am doing a particular painting, I remember.
Your printmaking, do you make any of your own tools also? I would like to hear.🙂