The palette knife I bought in 1994 at a hardware store on Karl-Heine-Straße
It was never meant for painting. It is a putty knife, a stiff one, with a wooden handle that has gone almost black at the thumb side. I bought it because I could not afford the proper scrapers that month, and now it is the only tool I really trust. Twenty-nine marks, if I remember right, and the shop is a bakery now.
I have proper palette knives. Good ones, from a supplier in Düsseldorf, balanced and beautiful. I use them for maybe ten percent of the work. The rest is this ugly thing that I have to hold at a bad angle because the blade has worn uneven. It digs. It makes a scrape that the expensive knives cannot make, a kind of tearing that leaves the underpainting showing through in streaks. When I try to plan that effect with a good tool, it looks like decoration. With the putty knife it just happens.
The handle is split now, about two centimeters down from the ferrule. I have wrapped it once with tape, which is worse than the split, so I took the tape off. I keep thinking I should buy another one, since putty knives are not rare. But a new one would have a square edge and a clean handle, and it would be a different tool. The whole point is that this one is no longer what it was sold as.
Naja. Some days I think this is the only honest thing in the studio. Everything else I chose. This one I just kept.
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This I understand very well, ji. We also have such things in the house, a bamboo stick my mother used for the fine lines, split at the tip, blackened from years of holding. My son brought me good brushes from Patna, very fine ones, but my hand still goes to the old one for the outlines. The tool learns your hand, and after so many years the hand does not want to learn a new one. The knife has worn uneven, you say, so you must hold it at bad angle. That is not a fault. That is twenty-nine marks of your own history. Keep it safe, do not lose it in the studio.
The bamboo stick. Split at the tip and blackened, and still the hand goes to it. That says everything, I think.
Your son meant well with the brushes from Patna. Mine bring me things too. But a tool you did not wear in yourself never quite sits right in the hand. The bad angle is the point, ja. It is the record of every time you reached for it.
I keep it in the same tin as the Düsseldorf ones. It has earned the place.