It’s an artist’s dream – you find yourself in sunny Edinburgh, in a superbly stocked art shop with £150 to spend on whatever you like. You can take as long as you like. There’s so much choice. Actually there’s almost too much choice.
This was me last last week, on my way to collect my prize voucher and wondering how I could spend this gift most wisely.
Earlier this year my charcoal drawing ‘Apparition’ was awarded the Greyfriars Art Shop Prize at the Society of Scottish Artists 127th annual exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
After thinking it over it decided I’d like to have something non-consumable which would stay in the studio rather than get used up in the making process, tools of some kind…ah brushes!
I still own brushes which have travelled through a creative life with me for decades, although most have been lost along the way, a tenacious few still live in jars in the studio.
I use brushes a lot in my charcoal drawing, to apply powder, to blend and soften, to introduce randomness and surprise and to make marks or textures to suggest tree surfaces. So it made sense to use my voucher to expand my brush collection, but which brushes should I choose?
Show me your biggest brush
I think about drawing with charcoal powder a little like using dry paint, although it definitely feels like drawing as I do it. Each brush has its own personality, its unique vocabulary of marks and it takes time to get to know what it can do. Unlike working with oil or watercolour there’s no standard charcoal brush, so anything brush-like can make a good tool.
I asked to see the biggest and strangest brushes from Greyfriars stock and made a pile of possibles. Then I spent a happy hour holding, waving, wafting, sweeping and generally getting the measure of them, to work out which felt like an extension of my own arm. I couldn’t test them with actual charcoal so I had to guess what they might do.
What can this brush do?
My final selection included a massive spalter, a soft little sweeping brush, a springy liner, some tactile stencil brushes, a few silicone shapers and two novel erasers. I was delighted with my new tools – time to test them.
I’ve just begun to find out what these brushes can do by making some swift swatches on my favourite Canson C à grain paper. Already I can see that the stencil brushes can create wonderfully diffuse discs of powdered charcoal, with an exciting balance of control and accident in the marks they make.
In 2023 I made a series called ‘Birken’ about birch trees and the witch’s broom growths they sometimes have in their upper branches and these stencil brush marks got me excited to draw more of these kind of tree forms.
As I introduced my fancy new brushes to the faithful old ones on my tool trolley, I though about all the joy they’d brought me, all those in-the-flow moments I’d had with a brush in my hand and an idea in my head. I don’t always look after them well, but sometimes the one with tatty bristles is just the thing you need.
However, I’ve made my prize brushes a promise – that I’ll take good care of them so they can serve me well for the decades of art making to come.
Thanks to Greyfriars Art Shop for their generous prize and to the Society of Scottish Artists for selecting my work for the exhibition.