After years of spending several valuable hours a week washing my oil painting brushes and feeling disappointed that the smallest and most delicate brushes, in particular, always suffered from my diligent time investment, I decided there must be a better way. I opted to, like Rembrandt, begin storing my brushes in oil, as least between back-to-back painting sessions. I kept them first in a jar, but rapidly found that it damaged the tips. I then moved to a plastic tray, but I worried about the interaction between solvent and plastic, and I also found that the brushes constantly slid downhill, becoming gooey and running into the reservoir wall, damaging the tips again (though perhaps not as badly as a jar). I switched to a metal tray, but in addition to its unsightliness, I found it to be a mess in all the same ways.

So, as is common with artists, I decided to create my own solution. I drew out my design, planning to make it out of wood in the time-honored tradition of crafted artists’ materials. I had visions of milling these out of a single block with a more designed, hand-carved look that still matched the dimensions and planes I wanted. However, after I began working with an industrial designer, it soon became clear that this was untenable from a both a cost and resources perspective. This was during the pandemic, when the price of wood skyrocketed, and I couldn’t find solutions to the waste issues with the design and the potential for warp and cracking, particularly here in dry Colorado with wood coming from elsewhere.

I considered almost every material, from plastics and resins to stamped/milled metal. We finally landed on ceramic, specifically, slip-cast porcelain. Though it presents a number of its own manufacturing difficulties, particularly in the category of breakage during transport, glaze-body fit, crazing, slumping, etc. it was the only material that met the set of criteria I had decided to prioritize:

1. An enduring, unchanging product that will never wear out and that can be handed down through generations, like a quality easel.
2. A beautiful product that feels both clean and contemporary but also “of the earth,” much like wood.
3. A chemically safe product that does not react with solvents or other materials.

This decision made, I proceeded with my designer to work through many CAD iterations of different design directions, slowly refining the look, shape, and dimensions. I 3D printed many of the prototypes to test in the studio, adjusting the ramp angle by a degree or two each time, curving the reservoir more, playing with the S curve and straight horizon intersection that creates the design and makes the brush handles easy to grasp.

I went through two 3D print companies and three ceramics manufacturers and countless shattered, leaking, warped, ugly, or otherwise unuseable trays before finally finding a good ceramic manufacturing partnership for these handmade objects. I filed for a patent during this process, and finally placed the first order in 2024. I am so excited about the work we’ve done to get here—three years of care and precise adjustments—and can’t wait to bring the Savvy Brush Tray into the fine art world.