Brush or Knife: Tools for Painters

Painting, like many common manual activities, necessitates a particular skill set, a set learned gradually over time as repetition, welcomed technical challenges, personal confidence, and routine accomplishment become second nature to the practitioner. Wielding brushes and slapping on or scraping off paint with a knife become standard, even graceful, movements for artists who embellish canvas, boards, paper, or walls. Most studios of working artists, whether professionals of world renown or amateurs whose only fans are close relatives, feature dozens, if not hundreds, of brushes, from small needle-shaped riggers and exotic-looking fan brushes to broad clapboard stainers, as well as several, or several dozen, palette knives, also available in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some artists only use the knives to mix paint on the palette. Others work with both knives and brushes to apply paint to the artwork surface. Very few work exclusively with knives. Specific detail notes, such as leaf edges or folds of clothing, and longer edges, such as horizon lines or roof eaves, are sometimes rendered with the long edge of a painting knife. Plein air painters often prefer to mix their paints directly on the canvas, choosing either knives or brushes, thereby facilitating immediate responses in oils to fleeting changes of sunlight and shade, of motion and emotion.

In some paintings, realistic or abstract, scant evidence of tools, marks from brush fibers or knife edges or pencil lines, is apparent. Other paintings practically broadcast the techniques used, with embedded brush strokes, scumbled dry-brush marks, mounded paint areas, scraped shapes revealing the underlying canvas weave, and even hand-prints. In earlier times, painters could not afford the luxury or indulgence of freely applying, wiping off, and reapplying paint layers, as paints were expensive and time-consuming to manufacture or acquire. Thanks to the invention of the paint tube in the nineteenth century, an era of access to an abundance of standardized colors of reliable consistency and durability debuted, with painters gradually exploring the implications, even employing impasto techniques without worry of exhausting their painting supplies. Thick paint application became characteristic of many Impressionist-era artists.

One notable user of the palette knife was Rembrandt whose heirloom tool, made of ivory, was last sold at auction in 1913. A previous owner of this knife was the acclaimed landscape painter Ruisdael. Besides employing the tool for mixing painting, it is likely that Rembrandt, Ruisdael, and many other artists since the seventeenth century, manipulated similar knives, made of steel or wood or even bamboo, to create highlights on jewelry or emphasize facial details, going for the tiny but defining mark or smoothing the flat plane of a forehead or scumbling nearly dry paint across a dark ground to simulate lace for portraits or foaming waves for seascapes. One contemporary critic claimed that the famous English landscapist John Constable was guilty of "over-freely" wielding his palette knife. In an entirely different manner, that of minimalist abstraction, New Yorker Brice Marden's most well-known works, large scale canvases, were executed chiefly through palette-knife application.

Many artists elect to refresh their working methods by deciding to establish and complete a composition entirely through the use of palette knives. Some are pleased with the results, but most return quickly to tried-and-true brush techniques. Knives are certainly a cheaper option, and easier to clean to boot. Quality brushes can cost $400 or more, although most retail in the under-$10 range. Steel knives rarely cost more than $20 and plastic versions are very inexpensive.

Because art is made in diverse ways, using traditional and newly invented techniques, materials, and methods, choosing one particular tool as ideal for producing great art is an impossibility. Still, most artists, now and in the past and probably in the foreseeable future, would stick with brushes and knives to apply paint and create fine artworks.

"Relics of Rembrandt: Great Painter's Palette-Knife and Mahlstick in London", New York Times

"John Constable: New Material in the new edition of Leslie's Life of the Artist", New York Times

Roberta Smith, "Art View: Brice Marden Moves Ahead by Turning Back", New York Times