Tools I reach for every day and one I never use
There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it.
And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing.
What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.
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That bit about the bone, I know exactly what you mean. I develop my prints in seawater I collect from the same stretch of coast every time, and I could probably get the same result from a bottle of something synthetic but it wouldn't be the same thing at all. There's something in the hand of it, the history. Your dog knew what was worth digging up.
YES. This is it exactly. I've got a palette knife my uncle left me when he died, it's bent and stained and probably not worth anything to anyone else but I can't make a painting without it being in the room. Even if I don't touch it. That's not sentimental, that's something real happening between you and the thing. The seawater thing is beautiful honestly. Your coast is in those prints whether anyone knows it or not.
Ah that's fierce kind of you to say. And that palette knife now, I know the one you mean without seeing it. There's things you'd replace easy enough and things you wouldn't and that's in a different category altogether. My father had a hammer, the head loose as anything, but it was his father's and you'd get the hand off you if you suggested he buy a new one. It's not about the tool at all, is it, it's about the hands that were on it before yours.
Ah now that's gas altogether. Seawater developer. I love that. There's a fella up in Mayo I used to know who swore by fixer made with rainwater off his own roof, said the minerals in it were different depending on the weather the day you collected it. Mad stuff but I half believed him.
The dog's a collie cross with absolutely no sense of what's valuable, she's brought me a dead gull and a welly and one time a traffic cone that must've weighed half what she does. But that bone, that was her one moment of taste. She's never topped it.