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Hi, this is Christina Varga from the Varga Gallery in Woodstock, New York and on behalf
of Expert Village today I’m going to show you how to be a self-taught artist, not an
easy thing. I buy my brushes compulsively all at once, like once every seven months.
I’ll go out and I’ll spend probably fifty dollars on brushes, which means that I’m
getting fifty brushes generally because I buy the cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap ones and
what I like to do. I’m really bad with them, I use them and if I’m using something that
is water soluble I’ll just stick them in a bucket so they always get you know built
up paint around them but really my goal is to get them like this, see that? That’s
really nubby, not because this is how I bought the brush but this is how much I use the brush.
I used the brush until it was just a nub and once it’s a nub it becomes almost like a
sculpting tool. Now you can go ahead and try to paint like me but you still won’t be
able too, so I’m going to tell you how I do it, because I’m really not all that concerned.
I make, I build, I sculpt like this, I do it over and over and over and over. Or here,
what I’ll do is I’ll take a big brush like this and I’ll push it down and I’ll
sculpt it in here. You know sometimes I do some fine brush work, in here that’s fine
brush work but mostly what I do is, I use my brushes as tools. I use them as tools to
move paint to do like a bas-relief sculpture, something that is flat but has so much texture
that when the light hits it, it does stuff to the paint and mostly what that does, what
that is, is it making shadows, creating shadows and highlights. I’m a sculptor at heart
I suppose so that’s what I do. Brushes, cheap and dirty.