More old brushes

Last week I wrote about the oldest brush I own, a boar bristle brush I bought 38 years ago when I was in college. It's the second from top in the photo. The three other brushes in this picture are actually in worse shape, and while considerably younger, they are still old bushes.

But I don't throw them out. The one at the top in the photo I used as a broad watercolor bush for a year or more before it began to deteriorate. Now I use it for priming canvas and linen. The two brushes at bottom are nylon or some version of nylon which means they're good for oil or acrilic glazing and they last significantly longer than natural sable brushes (which tend to be expensive anyway.) They go by cute names like sablette, but they are versions of nylon.

As you can see, they don't last forever either. The white handled brush is at least twenty years old but I still use it several times a month along with it's younger cousin with the brown handle. In both cases the nylon fibers have broken and splayed so that the brush no longer holds a cohesive shape. But I still use both for glazing large areas in which I've already built up a number of glazes.

Perhaps I should admit here that I also paint pretty actively with paint rags. That is to say that I apply the paint with a brush but then use a decrepit old paint rag to wipe most of the glaze or opaque paint off the canvas leaving only a trace on the surface. I like building up a color in this fashion but the brush is simply the means of getting the paint on the canvas. It's the paint rag that really leaves the 'brush-stroke' as it were.