Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA
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​It seems that our forgotten hunter-gatherer ancestors did not only extend the capability of the hand through the sharp hardness of stone tools but also through the pliability of the brush. To hunt and slaughter and to admire and draw the creatures with which we share the biosphere arose simultaneously.
 
This impressive study of the brush in all its multiple forms; from the crushed fibre of a severed branch to the careful selection of strands from a squirrel’s tail that allowed the sophistication of Southern Song brush painting are exhaustively examined in this extraordinary piece of scholarship which, in its diversity, becomes a celebration of human creativity.
 
Philip Bayliss Brown’s work from early hominid evolution through to the sophistications of Indian, Persian, European, Chinese, South, Meso- and North American and Australian uses of the brush, and the infinite varieties of fur, fibre and hair that were used in their construction, gives us a panoply of human inventiveness as interesting to Anthropologists as to Art Historians and to Artists themselves.From his research, we realise that the brush has been with us from the beginnings of our evolution and was as essential in our dawn as it is in our day. I sincerely hope that this compendium encourages people to make brushes of their own, to admire brushes in all the richness of their making and to use them now to make new works that bear witness to the times in which we live.

Professor Paul Fieldsend-Danks
Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Fine Art,
Arts University Plymouth

The act of making art is so often a private endeavour, one that involves the mind and the hand of an individual in an act of artistic expression. We can feel this agency through the residual traces of activity that are left behind, giving life to an inanimate surface. We sense this endeavour as we search for the evidence of making, a determinant of the artists’ hand manifest through the twist of a line, the movement of paint, or the seemingly impossible simulation of reality. But rarely do we stop to consider the mechanics of such work, as our interpretation of image and our sensory experience of looking take precedence over other considerations. 
 
In this book, Philip Bayliss Brown opens our eyes to one such consideration, bringing to light arguably one of the most important instruments in creative expression, the artists’ brush. In doing so, we are furnished with both the historical development of this ubiquitous tool through extant evidence dating back to c.433 BCE; and we are given an insight into the complex relationship between the typologies of the brush and the cultural contexts in which they are found. 
 
This fascinating book provides valuable scholarship in the history, manufacture and physics of the humble brush, and interrogates the elegance of this tool as if it were the subject of our gaze itself.  ​