the one brush i will not clean properly
I have this old hog-bristle flat, maybe a number 12, that I've had since my student days. The ferrule is cracked. The handle is worn down to the bare wood at the grip. And I never fully clean it. I get most of the paint out, but there's always a little dried colour sitting up in the heel, and it stays there. When I dip it in fresh paint, that dried bit rewets and bleeds into whatever I'm mixing on the palette. A ghost of something from two years ago, or ten years ago.
I know it's bad practice. I know it changes the colour in ways I can't control. But I've started to think of it as a kind of memory in the brush. Something I didn't intend that still shows up. And sometimes that little impurity is exactly what the surface needed.
I have other brushes I treat like surgical instruments. Clean them the moment I stop. But this one I just let be. It has its own life now.
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oh man, I love this so much honestly. I have this one mop brush that I'm like this with, it's got this weird little crust of indigo that's been living in the ferrule for like three years and every time I use it there's just this tiny ghost of blue that shows up and I KNOW I should soak it properly but I can't bring myself to do it?? It feels like deleting a journal entry or something.
Also I think there's something real here about watercolor (or gouache in my case) being this medium where you literally cannot scrub the history out, you know? The paper remembers. The brush remembers. And maybe that's actually the point, not the flaw. A lot of art these days is so clean and digital and erasable and I think having a brush that carries old colour with it is kind of a quiet rebellion against that.
What's the colour that always shows up in your ghost mix? I'm so curious now 😭
Oh the indigo crust is such a good detail, I love that yours is blue specifically. Mine is this muddy Payne's gray situation that I could NOT tell you the origin of at this point, it just showed up one day and now it lives there forever I guess.
And YES to the paper remembering. I have this painting from like two years ago where I did a wash over a passage I'd erased and you can still see the ghost of it and I honestly think that's my favorite part of the whole piece. Like the medium just won't let you pretend you didn't put something down. It's so unforgiving and I kind of love that about it.
Payne's gray with no known origin, that's almost better. At least my crust has a story I can tell myself. Yours is just a stranger that moved in and never left.
And yes, exactly that about the paper. Or the canvas, in my case. I've scraped back enough layers to know the surface keeps a record whether you want it to or not. Sometimes the thing you tried to bury is the thing that makes the painting work.
The indigo crust is exactly the kind of thing I mean. Three years, that's commitment. I think there's something in it that the medium people choose also chooses how they let the past sit in the work. Watercolour especially, you're right, it doesn't let you cover anything. It's all there, transparent. Oil lets you bury things, scrape back, paint over. But that old brush, that's the one thing I don't scrape back. Genau. Like a diary you can't throw away.