Painting Tools, Brush to Squeegee

Artists have made their own tools for most of our history.  Brushes were no exception. Only in the 19th century do manufactured brushes become commonplace.  Because  many artists relied upon  their fingers and rags for the paint’s manipulation, brushes were just one of their painting tools . By the mid 19th century Courbet was experimenting with the now common palette knife. Today  our contemporary paint applicators range from cake decorating tubes and the various nozzles, to plastic spatulas, to dental tools, to rubber color shapers, to  air brush nozzles,  to a vast range of brushes, sponges,  and more.  The “more” includes the window washer’s squeegee.  Gerhard Richter has made the squeegee famous but, others have experimented  with it  as well.  In the following examples I demonstrate various squeegee and brush effects  when worked together. You can make your own squeegee devices from stiff cardboard to credit cards or, reshape your brushes with a pair of scissors.    In  the Renaissance an apprenticing artist was expected to learn to make his own brushes in addition to gold leafing, preparing paints from pigments, preparing  painting surfaces and even frame building.

In this first example you can see some of the varied effects Gerhard Richter discovered with his squeegee experiments.

In my second  and third examples I have the squeegees  and brushes I used to create  the paintings  you see  in the following examples.

example 2. squeegees.

example 3. brushes.

examples 4  and 5.  my palette.
 

My palette has accumulated piles of dried paint as you can see. Some of the piles now reach to about 10 vertical inches, others are a more modest 4 to 6 inches.   For example 6, the paint was initially laid in with 4″ brushes (illustrated). In example 6 you see that I am not using a white ground. Rather, I am relying on the effect of the brushed gold finish of this sheet of anodized aluminum (36×36).  The squeegees were used up to build the image seen in example 6. Example 7’s blue paint was applied with the 4″ and 2″  flat, soft synthetic nylon brushes.
example 6. intermediate stage.

example 7. Final stage.

In example  8 you see the image as it was created by a joint use of the same squeegees and brushes as above, after a final glaze layer  of translucent ultramarine blue was applied.  This  glaze was selectively removed while wet with a variety of squeegees to reveal the red/brown and other highlights found in the tall reeds.
example 8.anodized aluminum, white surface.

My last example 9,  Times Square  is another oil on anodized aluminum(white surface),36×36.  The shapes were carved out using  a variety of squeegees.  Finally, atmospheric perspective  was amplified by applying a semi-opaque light glaze to the  central geographically most distant area.
example 9.