Brushes with Greatness

Drawing is fundamental to Camille Henrot’s practice. The French artist is known for producing work that seems boundless, spanning everything from film and sculpture to painting and performance. Yet it is the daily act of picking up a brush that forms the foundation of her creativity. She has been drawing with the calligraphy kind since she was a child, fascinated by the relative difficulty the extended bristles pose. Now, she uses all manner of models to create rapid, gestural sketches which can be joyous, farcical, sensual or macabre.

The magic of these images lies in their immediacy, but finding the space to engage in such a ritual can be tricky. The artist’s time-poor schedule proved particularly demanding during the pandemic. ‘It was a very difficult time,’ Henrot says. ‘I had a small child and I lost my studio, so I was constantly being interrupted. I never had enough time to draw and really get into the flow. There is so much invisible information stored in your head and in your body – it is like gymnastics. I didn’t have time to get into that rhythm, to remember “this brush is fast; this one is slow; this one is rigid” so I began building a reference library of brushes and brushstrokes, so I could access it all much quicker. It became a palette of all these graphic possibilities.’

Henrot’s large, flat brushes are organised by size and hang alongside her reference books

The result is a glorious compendium of tools, consisting of delicate feathers, densely packed paddles and whiskery fans, all of which populate the walls of her New York studio. While some might not look out of place in a quotidian art-supply store, others were acquired in specialist emporiums. ‘Every time I travel to Asia I buy brushes,’ the artist explains. ‘The ones you buy in Korea have a synthetic centre, so they are supposedly less fancy, but I love how flexible they are. They are very difficult to control, and they move extremely fast against the surface.’

She also recalls being inspired during a trip to Japan, where Shino Nomura (curator of her show at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2019) took her to a dedicated shop that was filled with every imaginable material: ‘There were brushes made from pheasant feathers, chickens, peacocks, and hair from racoons, goats, squirrels and horses – there was even cat,’ she says.

Hanging from this rack are ‘less delicate, synthetic brushes that are easy to wash’ as well as ‘large calligraphy brushes that are too precious and too difficult to clean’

The artist’s favourite brushes, which are used most often, include ‘a bamboo fibre brush that is very fragile and a wild pig brush with an interesting resistance’. As she explains: ‘Some of these are not very precious in terms of price, but very precious to me because of the unique lines they make’

Featuring an array of stamps and labels, these brushes are from a Japanese hardware store. As the artist explains: ‘They are commonly used for glue and fabrication – less for painting – but I use them often with watercolour’

More examples of hardware and flat brushes, alongside a few more delicate varieties

Beyond these exclusive wares, Henrot is not afraid of making her own modifications. She often trims bristles to better suit her needs, and even had a happy accident with a glue spillage, which irrevocably hardened a brush. ‘I couldn’t remove the glue, but I realised the solidity made an interesting line,’ she says.

This aversion to any easy path through image-making is key. The artist is fascinated by organisational systems, the friction between analogue and digital worlds, and the grit that comes with unknotting a perplexing problem. ‘My drawings are most successful when I’m challenged,’ she says. ‘As an artist you can get into the bad habit of going back to the same solution. Different brushes can force you into a different space.’

An array of brushes exemplifying Henrot’s varied tastes, including examples from hardware stores and specialist calligraphy tools

Along with her hanging selection, the artist’s large-scale flat brushes are kept in pots

Never was this truer than when she suffered a broken arm in 2021. While both immobilised and in considerable pain, she decided to digitise her binder of brushstrokes, which form a hand-wrought companion guide to her physical brush library. This array of individual swatches captures the distinct capabilities of every implement, whether it be a delicate spatter or a dense, angular line.

Produced as both negative and positive images, then manufactured as vinyl stickers, these brushstrokes became part of a wider, strangely uncanny surface of cuts, scrapes and vector graphics, that feel like a rather crowded computer screen. For Henrot: ‘It presented an amazing opportunity to experiment with the brush library in a new way.

‘I came to the idea of using the brushstrokes as a mask, as a layer within a painting,’ she says, in reference to a method of stencilling that is often used in digital editing. It proved the perfect solution for a new commission for the Anna Polke Foundation (as part of Sigmar Polke’s 80th-anniversary exhibition). Working with the latter’s master printer, Mike Karstens, she began overseeing the production of pieces that held all the slickness of a screenprint, yet featured the unique gestural strokes of her own hand.

The artist has continued this line of inquiry with a series of mixed-media paintings that draw on various personal archives, including photographs, old bank statements and pages of an array of etiquette books owned by her mother. These works are currently on show at the Perimeter in London, alongside a selection of her daily drawings. To see both in tandem is to understand the equilibrium of her practice – both multifaceted and dense on the one hand, yet intrinsic, raw and expressive on the other. At the root of it all, though, is the relationship between the artist’s hand and the production of an image, whatever path that make take.

‘Camille Henrot: Don’t’ runs at The Perimeter, London, until 25 July. For more information, visit theperimeter.co.uk