I wonder how much notice we really take of all that advice in magazines and books - we may nod sagely, but do we actually take it in? I have a lot of brushes - big ones, medium-sized ones, small ones. Looking at them a few weeks ago, I realized I've been using the titchy ones all too often (ie, they were the most worn-down). And this is nearly always a mistake - a big brush (say, a size 12 hog, about 1 inch wide) makes actual marks - it can cut into paint to produce a definite shape; it can be used in oil or acrylic or watercolour (though with the last of these, it would be a hake, or a flat synthetic) to make a giant tick - suitable for the representation of the feathers on a bird's wing. It can make a path, or a river - in just one stroke of a loaded brush. Small brushes on the other hand will give a mosaic effect, compelling you to make a plethora of tiny strokes. This is particularly true of one of my least favourite brushes, the Bright - they have their place, eg painting brickwork, cutting around small corners, painting stones, tiles: but in oil and acrylic, they become clogged with paint very quickly, leaving you with an implement about as subtle as painting with the corner of a towel. I used to employ large rounds - I was in good company, they're what the old masters generally used, although not in the same shapes as are available today (they tended to be much longer). But these days I am rediscovering the joys of some of my oldest brushes - big, wide, but fairly short flats, made many years ago by what was in those days George Rowney & Co. I read somewhere or other that a flat brush isn't suitable for painting the sky, because it leaves tile-like marks - which just goes to show that you should always read with a healthy degree of scepticism, because a big flat brush is capable of so much more than that: it offers precision, it can provide the gentlest of touches, and you know what it's going to do: a big round can be a lot harder to control, and at any given point it's quite possible that only a small portion of the brush will actually be in contact with the canvas. A large flat enables you to see what you're doing: it makes a crisp, definite mark; and as for this "tiling" effect, well - that's the thing about oil paint: you can feather it, and blend it. One of my most recent paintings - of the local landslip, when we lost a section of road between the village in which I live and the town a few miles away - used large flats almost exclusively: I was able to feather in the tops of the trees; to paint slabs of rock using just one stroke; to indicate the fallen road with two slashes of brush-work, It may be that it could benefit from a bit more detail - and it wouldn't be hard to do it. But if I'd used small brushes, I'd have niggled away at it, and not caught the sheer monumentality of the road's collapse. The big brush, holding a variety of mixed colours, was able to lay down a surface that is interesting in itself. This is as true of watercolour: a mop, or a hake, or a combination of both, compels you to take a bold approach: you can't fiddle with things with a big brush, it just won't let you. They say less is more - a phrase I have sometimes found distinctly irritating - but you can't accomplish anything practical from that theory if you use tiny brushes, even with a minimalist approach: it just looks as though you've not finished the painting. Big, broad washes, on the other hand, can speak volumes - and cover an awful lot of paper: they're especially effective in a dry-brush technique. Even the corner of a large brush can make surprisingly accurate shapes - more so, sometimes, than the filbert, that compromise between the round and the flat which is supposed to incorporate the advantages of both. In my experience, big brushes get rid of so many of the problems of painting in any medium, because if you use them you just "worry" the paint so much less - you aren't chasing the paint round the canvas or paper, filling it little bits here and there: "fiddling" becomes virtually impossible. So in future - just call me Ivor Biggun.........