Cleaning Paintbrushes
I recently sat down to paint after a long while. I realized as soon as I started painting that I’d neglected to do something pretty important the last time I worked – I didn’t clean my brushes. Now, if you know me, you know that this isn’t an uncommon occurrence - I don’t clean them near as often as I ought to. I put it off until I can’t possibly wait any longer, and inevitably have a couple of casualties in the process.
Despite the lengthy existence of this habit, the feeling that I get when I sit down to paint with totally clean brushes is almost enough to convince me that cleaning them more often is worth it. The paint simply glides onto the canvas, and the brushes are well-shaped and exact. In addition to this obvious advantage, I genuinely enjoy cleaning my brushes. It’s calming and it has the potential to help me get out of a creative rut. So why don’t I do it as often as I should? Simple: it feels like a waste of time. I’m not quite sure why though, maybe because I am not actively putting paint on the canvas? In that case, wouldn’t setting up my easel, palette, and canvas all be a waste of time as well? But those are necessary to complete the act of painting…so maybe I think that way because cleaning the brushes comes after the actual painting. Of course, it makes it easier to paint the next time if I clean them, but the time between is so stretching that it seems like a disconnected act. So, I put it off.
I use a lot of brushes and put cleaning them off for a while, so the task takes quite a long time. Sometimes up to a half-hour, never less that fifteen minutes. The paint is hardened and cracked, extremely difficult to get off the brushes, and sometimes I have to soak them overnight to make any progress at all. If I cleaned them after each painting session it would be much easier to clean them, but again, why waste the time? The temporary gain of five more minutes painting seems much more valuable than a later on half hour spent methodically cleaning my brushes, so why question that intuition?
In my room, I have a stack of books that are separated from the rest. They sit sectioned off, waiting to be accepted into the rest of the rankings. The reason that they are separate is because they are a bit different than the others – they’re workbooks.
I’ve had them for about a year now, maybe a bit more. They’re all from my stepmother who is one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to art, life, and love. She has dedicated time to going through all of them methodically, learning more about her craft and herself in the process, and then handed them down to me. I haven’t wanted to get rid of them through multiple purging sessions, moving houses, and even moving across the country - yet I still haven’t made the time to go through them. Why? Well, it feels like a waste.
If I follow the pattern that I have set with my brushes, I’ll wait until my habits and ideas are old and hardened before I work through those books. I’ll probably have to take a few years to break myself down, and maybe more to soak myself in some sort of concentrated treatment to break through the layers that time has compounded onto me. Then I can finally learn a better way to create, live, and love.
But yesterday after I painted, I washed my brushes. Right away. It was as refreshing as I thought it would be, and it gave me hope. Hope that maybe five minutes a day spent on changing my habits isn’t a waste of time, and that change can be incremental. Today I am working through one of those workbooks, and thus I am breaking down a layer of my old self, getting one step closer to finding out who I could be.
