Last week, the new catalogue from Rosemary & Co arrived - probably the most beautifully illustrated yet, with contemporary paintings enlivening its pages. A quick look at the bank account established that I'd have to wait a while before buying the watercolour mop I want; the wretched Council Tax has to come first - bailiffs don't accept unsold paintings in lieu of hard cash, unfortunately - but it's just a matter of time... Now, I know that probably I shouldn't be recommending products here, but if you all keep quiet, Dawn will never know.... And anyway, I derive no benefit from it. Just to cover myself, however, I am happy to concede that other manufacturers' products are available. And some are very good. Indeed, the art of the brush manufacturer seems to be in pretty good nick, with excellent ones for all media available. Even so - I suppose my favourite medium, not necessarily the one I'm best at, is oil paint. Traditionally, one had a choice of hog hair brushes for the donkey work, maybe cheaper bristle for the underpainting, and a variety of sables or Mongoose for glazing (plus badger blenders, even goat hair). It's possible to get a bit fetishistic over brushes: when you see what painters of yesteryear put up with, the suspicion cannot but grow that these days we are unbelievably lucky in the choice available. Even so, I'm firmly of the view that you can't have too many of them; that each medium you use requires its own set of brushes - you certainly don't want to be using your best watercolour sables with oils, or vice versa, come to that; and that while the beaten up old brush certainly has its place, the brushes in your collection should be kept in the best condition possible, and should be the best you can afford in the first place. Hence a discovery I feel duty bound to pass on to all oil painters. Not Flake White oil paint this time, so Martin Kinnear can breathe again, but a brush that Rosemary introduced about a year ago, I think - her Ivory range, which I understand to be outselling even her excellent Chungking hogs. There was a problem, before the advent of synthetics, with finding a rigger which had the fineness of line and the strength to handle oil paint, other than at its most heavily oiled or thinned. Sables really weren't up to it; Mongoose could be a little more resilient. Then came the nylon and other synthetic riggers, which did a pretty good job at moving the paint around, but somehow lacked the "feel" required. The best ones I found until recently were the old ABS Reflex range, now re-named as Rosemary's Shiraz rigggers: and they're still good, I still use them, in both oil and acrylic (different brushes, separately stored and marked: I'm not by any means methodical, but do insist on this). The Ivory range - which I tried really because I just liked the look of it and realized that, the filament being white, I'd be able to tell when they were really properly cleaned - is the best synthetic I've so far found for handling oil paint, and the rigger has both the firmness and the flexibility to do exactly what I want of it. I'm not an investor in Rosemary & Co, more's the pity, but I wanted to pass this on to all oil painters out there who haven't yet tried them (they're available across the range, filberts, flats, etc, but the riggers filled my particular need). I shall yield to this and the many other temptations the catalogue provides as soon as I have met the Local Authority's persistent demands for cash for all those services I don't actually receive.... Steadily working through the 7" by 5" canvases I bought last month, in the meantime: I have a feeling it will be a long time before I feel any urge to work as small as this again - but it's been interesting to drop down to a scale like this: it poses a whole new set of problems of composition, and brush size and stroke; and I seem to be restricting the colours I use, which is probably a good thing in itself. But modelling paint, and adding textural quality, are very difficult at this size .... We plough on, regardless....