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The grades and shapes of brushes, the finest taken from the tails of Russian sable that can be tied only by men with murderous fingers; the smell of turpentine and poppy oil and the dry dust of pastels and the hot hoof stew of size; the worn and familiar nature of battered, dappled, notched and smooth things in studio rooms, the pliers and the knives, the handles of map chests, the fit of a thumb into a palette, the rattle of hog brushes in a jam jar, the crumbly scratch of charcoal on paper, the wet fart of the last squeeze of flake white, the dull funereal drum of well-stretched Belgian linen when it's primed, the smooth cool paste of egg tempera and the pigments with their stories, the passion of color, the lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan and ground gently because if treated with violence it shatters to white, making a blue so expensive, so beautiful, it could only be the color of the Mother of God's robe and of heaven, the virginal white that would poison you, the pure and deadly cancerous cadmium, sublime yellow from the urine of cows fed on mangos, red from crushed beetles, imperial purple from shells traded by the Phoenicians.
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A.A. Gill