Barbara J Carter

What is an artist without her brushes?

Someone recently asked me what size brush I use for my paintings. He was looking right at my paintings when he asked. I thought that was funny. Isn’t it obvious? I make a brushstroke, and there it is. There’s no trickery. The size of the brushstroke is the size of the brush. Easy!

But hey, I should be fair. Not everyone uses paintbrushes on a daily basis. Maybe it isn’t as obvious to other people as it is to me.

In fact, I’ve been asked what tool I paint with. My brushstrokes look so regular, I guess people expect some truly strange implement. A foam stenciling brush? The end of a large stick? A big eyedropper? My fingers? Nope, sorry, nothing so exotic. I just use good old-fashioned artists’ brushes.

So here’s a picture of my brushes (above). The center jar contains my “workhorse” brushes. These are the brushes I use to lay color on my paintings, that leave the visible brushstrokes. The brushes in the lefthand jar are specialty brushes for sketching, signing, touchups, etc. I use the two housepainting brushes in the right jar for putting a protective topcoat on a finished painting.

Of my main workhorse brushes, the largest is nearly an inch wide. That size is for my largest paintings (40 inches and up). For painting 14×11″ or smaller paintings I usually use one that’s just under 1/2 inch across. I’ll usually grab a 3/4″ brush for intermediate size paintings, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. (See the picture below for a closeup of these brushes, my workhorses.)

The brushes I prefer are made from natural bristles. Acrylic painters are told to use synthetic brushes because they stand up to acrylic paint better, but all the synthetic brushes I’ve ever used felt way too flimsy to use with the stiff paint I use. I like the firmness of the natural bristles. But admittedly acrylic paint is hard on natural bristles, and they do wear out with use. So then I have to buy more. At any given time, my collection will include older and newer brushes as I cycle through them.

I mostly use brushes of a certain shape: flat, with a rounded end. This shape is called “filbert”. Here’s a picture of some of them:

The oldest brush in this group is the one with red-tinted bristles. It no longer makes clean brushstrokes (the bristles splay out and leave ragged streaks). I use it to tone my canvases red, which it still does just fine. The two that show a blue tinge are in current use. They’ve been stained by an intense blue color I added to my palette when I moved back to California, phthalo blue. It’s a great color, but it stains pretty intensely, as you can see. The white one hasn’t been used yet… or else it wouldn’t be so white!

What is an artist without her brushes? A fingerpainter, I guess!

Everyone is very clear about what kind of music they like, and what they don’t like.

Ask someone what kind of music they like, and they’ll immediately rattle off a list of favorites. Ask what music they hate, and they’ll list their dislikes with no hesitation. There’s no embarrassment about it. Everyone knows it’s okay not to like every kind of music!

Art is like music. There’s a huge variety of art out there. There’s something for everyone. Not everyone will like everything, but that’s okay.

A lot of people seem to be embarrassed when they see art they don’t like. They think “If it’s in a museum or art gallery, it must be good, right? What’s wrong with me if I don’t like it?” I’m here to tell you: there’s nothing wrong with you.

You don’t have to love all kinds of art.

It helps if you can articulate why you like or dislike something, but even the most highly educated connoisseurs have the occasional knee-jerk reaction. We all have our biases. Sometimes you see something and you just LIKE it. Or HATE it. Looking at art, you never know when you’ll have one of those intense, visceral reactions. It’s part of what makes looking at art exciting and fun.

Certainly it’s good to keep an open, inquiring mind when it comes to styles of art that you don’t immediately love at first sight. A little background information can make a huge difference in how you perceive the work. This is especially true for abstract or conceptual art, but it can help even with a seemingly straightforward landscape or still-life.

Just remember that if you really don’t like something, it’s okay. You’re allowed to have art preferences, just like you have musical preferences. The important thing is just going out and looking at some art!

One question I get asked about my art… a LOT… is

“What do you call this style?”

This question always makes me blanch a little. I know it’s an innocuous question, I should just answer simply and move on. But the answer is complicated. It gets into the core of why I do what I do and how important it is to me. So, I find it a difficult question to answer.

The quickie answer I’ve come up with is that my style is a form of “neo-pointillism”, only with bigger “dots” and looser rules about what colors I can use. True Pointillism was a very brief movement, mostly promulgated by Georges Seurat. It required the use of tiny dots of color that, like pixels on a TV screen, blur together into a recognizable image (such as people on a riverbank). My style starts with the general idea of Pointillism but loosens the rules… a lot. My dots are large brushstrokes, and they are often elongated and even sometimes curved. Strict Pointillism requires using only a very few colors, but I don’t restrict the number of colors I use. I start with a solid red background rather than a white canvas. And so on.

So, the short answer is that my paintings are sort of Pointillist, but different.

To me, the difference is vastly important. It’s my own unique twist on the idea. It’s what sets my work apart from everything else. I don’t like calling it anything other than “my style”. It’s different, and I want it to be different. That’s why I’m so proud of it!

So, I’d like to say “It’s just my style.”

But that’s not what they’re asking. They KNOW it’s my style. What they want to know is where it came from, what genre it belongs to, what historical (or political or philosophical) school of thought, what teacher, how it came to be. They want a category so it can be neatly filed away. They want to be able to say “Oh yes, that’s the Pointillist artist.”

I understand this need. I really do! I do exactly the same thing when I look at other artists’ paintings. When I look at a painting I classify it: it’s a plein-air landscape, or a realistic still-life, or an abstract, or whatever. We all like being able to categorize stuff this way. It’s efficient. It helps us remember stuff. It’s how our brains work. I do it too. So I understand why they ask.

And in fact, their asking is a compliment. A really big, serious compliment, if I can only get myself to see it that way. They’re asking because it’s NOT obvious what “category” my work falls into. That’s exactly what I’m aiming for! I’m trying to blur the boundary between abstract and realism, between a painting of “something” and a painting that’s abstract blobs of color on a canvas. When someone can’t categorize my work and needs to ask what it is, I should see this as a triumph. It worked! It’s so different, they don’t know what it is!

But it’s still hard for me to answer the question.

Welcome to my blog!

Of course, I already have a regular web site, www.barbarajcarter.com, where you can see all my paintings (well, most of them anyway!), find out where my next show will be, and read up on how I got into this art stuff.

This blog, now, this is different. Here I can be a bit more chatty, kind of like the conversations I have with visitors at my shows.

Indeed, the questions I get at my shows provide most of the ideas for my future blog entries.

For example, I will discuss my painting style and how it began. I’ll talk about the artists who’ve inspired me. I’ll explain my methods. I’ll post images of paintings in progress to show how my work evolves. I’ll talk about acrylic paint and its unique properties.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write about the care and feeding of acrylic paintings. Like whether they should be varnished, and the relative merits of displaying them framed versus “naked”.

This is going to be fun! See you around my blog!