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October 15, 2007
To Wash or Not to Wash?
And I’m not talking decisions concerning personal hygiene here. Rather I’m referring to the recurring dilemma I’m presented with at the end of a day’s painting.
To wit: do I wash out the brushes? The ideal would be to leave everything so that the brushes, charged as they are with their history of today’s painting, would be ready to partake again tomorrow.
And they would be, tomorrow, mainly, with the exception of Burnt Umber which dries in the time it takes to get the brush from the palette to the panel, being a siccative an’ all.
But I might not be painting tomorrow. Tomorrow there may be other demands on my time. And the brushes will get thicker and more unwieldy by the day. This is ok if you earn enough to keep buying new brushes, and it creates those clichéd pots of old dried-up paint brushes we see in every artist’s studio.
But I don’t earn enough to keep buying new brushes, so I wash them out and lose a bit of the painting. And tomorrow or the next day, when I paint again, I will have to spend time getting the brushes up to speed.
Posted by john at October 15, 2007 10:49 PM