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Show 130 case. His collection of brushes, too, pleased him to look at. He liked to run them through his fingers and sort out the wide ones from the narrow ones and experience briefly the delicious panic of not knowing which of the ones in the middle sizes were wide and which were narrow. Each brush had its character. There were some whose straw-colored bristles were firm and strong, with an edge like a knife; others which the repeated abrasion and cleaning (turpentine, followed by soap and water) had worn to a ragged softness; still others, used mostly to scour a thinned-out pigment onto a coarse foreground area, were sprained permanently: no amount of softening, washing, or immersion in thick paint would bring together those bristles from the warped and twisted eyelash that spread in every direction from the base of the ferrule. There were round brushes too, of graduated size, used mostly for outlines and thin washes, and a bamboo brush with a cap that pinched off a few more bristles around the edge every time he replaced it. There were three palette knives, a stiff sharp one and two flexible ones with rounded ends, one of them bent into an obtuse L just below the handle like a bricklayer's trowel. There was a flat, lidless tuna fish can to hold his turpentine, wiped clean and brassy on the inside and grey as mold on the outside. Other odds and ends were scattered around, the detritus of countless formations in mixed media-stumps of charcoal, discolored fragments of chalk, a roll of packaging tape that had gotten wet and could not be unrolled, a roll of adhesive tape, a sprinkling of pencils, a felt-tip pen in an aluminum casing, a rock, a small file, a tablespoon to pry open the lid of a can of white lead. He cleared a place for the white hospital tray he used for a palette and began squeezing the first of his colors around its edges, a flood of burnt orange, a dollop of aquamarine blue, a wink of yellow. It was never clear at the start how much you were going to use of |
