What I watched this week
Gerhard Richter Painting — Corinna Belz, 2011. Richter pulling a squeegee the width of his body across a canvas three times his height. The whole film is watching a man make decisions about marks, then unmake them, then make them again. I think the takeaway from this movie is that the most dramatic tool in the room is the one actually doing the work. Usually it's flat.
Like Richter's work?
Yeah, I'm no fan. This is why galleries and "high art" (sponsored, overpriced, elitist) are failing today. We are done with squeegees.
But I also did not fall in love with the flat brush this life around. There was never any epiphany. No moment when a flat brush arrived in my life the way the Isabey mop arrived, or the way Prussian Blue arrived some winters ago.
The flat brush has no personality, but it has a function.
And that function — laying even washes across large areas, pulling pigment from one edge of the paper to the other without interruption, building the sky— is the work that everything else depends on. The interesting marks sit on top of what the flat brush made. The wet-on-wet bloom happens inside the wet field, the flat brush prepared. You cannot see the flat brush's work in the finished painting, which is exactly the condition of its success. It constructs the opportunity but is not it.
When a painting fails for me, it usually fails at the foundation. The sky was rushed. The first wash was uneven. The water loading was wrong. Too much, too little, too milky, too transparent. Almost always, I trace it back to the flat brush: wrong size, wrong speed, overworked— too many passes across a layer that was already starting to dry.
I swear, one doesn't need a psychiatrist; just learn to watercolor.
I have a 1-inch and a 2-inch. They are not glamorous. They are the reason the rest of the work has somewhere to live. They are of great quality, though.
What I read this week
Cy Twombly, from his notes on practice:
"Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realisation."
I have been thinking about this in relation to the flat brush, which seems the least experiential tool. It is just coverage. But coverage is a decision. The scale of the sky is a claim about what the painting assumes. Even the flat line knows more than it looks like.
Which reminds me of this:
He sounds like me dictating my dreams in the morning.
What I love this week — two things, because I cannot help myself
Jack Richeson 9000 Series Synthetic Flat Brush — 1-inch
This is the brush you use before the painting is a painting — for the initial wash, the sky, the large wet ground that everything else will sit on. Synthetic, which means it holds slightly less water than squirrel; useful here, because you get more control over how fast the wash runs. The 1-inch covers most working formats up to 12x16 in a reasonable number of passes, which matters; every additional pass risks disturbing the layer beneath. Lays flat, doesn't lift, easy to clean. Not romantic. Indispensable.
Jack Richeson 9000 Series Synthetic Flat Brush — 2-inch
When you start working on a large 22x30-inch paper, anything that needs a real background or sky, the 1-inch becomes a king. The 2-inch is even better. You lay a wash in fewer passes, which means less risk of lifting the wet layer, less streaking, less of that frantic quality that creeps in when you're racing the drying edge. It's also my go-to for wetting paper before a wet-on-wet section: the broad, even coverage prepares the surface the way a good primer prepares a wall. The wall doesn't know what you'll paint on it. Neither does the paper. That's the whole point.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
- Cy Twombly on Lines and Mark-Making — NuArtPlanet — on how scribbling, when done by someone who has decided something, is not decoration. Worth reading before you pick up any brush, including the flat one. Twombly > Richter. Always.
- J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours — Tate — the searchable archive of Turner's 300+ sketchbooks. Study his flat washes. It's free.
- Inspired by Andrew Wyeth — Belinda del Pesco — on what happens when a painter commits seriously to another painter as a study. The influence of a single master on a single practice, written with full honesty about what the looking changed.
What I'm working on, studio bits.
New Newlands (New England abstract-ed landscapes) pieces at 22x30 inches. The skies are taking most of the session — I'm working wet-on-wet for the first washes, which means the flat brush is doing everything foundational before I reach for anything more particular. The paintings look like almost nothing at this stage. Sky, water, the horizon between them. Then something starts to happen in the layers. I am in the stage before that.
"A line is a dot that went for a walk." — Paul Klee
