ASI 70 Exploring the Artistry of Da Vinci Brushes: History, Innovation, and Finding the Perfect Brush for Your Masterpiece

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome back to Art Supply Insiders. My name is Jeff Morrill and today we're talking with Greg Daniels, and Greg is the owner of Gregory Daniels Fine Arts. Greg, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 0:20

I'm well, Jeff. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 0:23

Well, thanks for coming on, and I know that you guys distribute a brand of brushes called Da Vinci Brushes, and why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got involved with it and in the beginning stages of all of that?

Speaker 2: 0:40

Okay, well, my family has a long history in art materials. We started in 1924 in New York City and eventually we made our way out to Los Angeles and we had an art supply store My grandfather had called HG Daniels Company and we were there until 1996. So he was in the art materials business about 75 years, and then my father and then myself. So I decided I did not want to be in the retail side of the business and in 1998 I started working with Da Vinci Brushes because I really thought they were the best brushes in the world In our store.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Growing up, i love selling brushes and I love selling oil paint. Those are my two favorite things. So at the time we started importing the brushes with a very famous art supply store in New York City called New York Central Art Supply. We're old friends of ours and we would bring over the Da Vinci Brush Shipments and we'd split them and half would come to Los Angeles and half would stay in Manhattan. The brushes were incredible and the selection amazed me.

Speaker 2: 1:55

I started looking at the catalog and it was this enormous selection of brushes, family owned, and I was very intrigued. So I met the owners while I was still a retailer and in 1997 I wrote them a letter to become their importer and shortly thereafter I started working with them and worked with them up until 2001 and then in 2001 I became the sole importer from North America so for the US and Canada of Da Vinci Brushes. So I'm responsible for all the sales and marketing and just kind of steering the brand in North America, and it's a wonderful company to work with. They're family owned, the Deffit family and now the Meyer families as well. So I'll just tell you a little bit about the history.

Speaker 1: 2:52

Sure, please do.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Yeah, yeah, da Vinci started in 1890 and the same family, the Deffit family, is still operating, owning and operating the company and they're in Nuremberg, germany. Nuremberg's very interesting, and you have Faber-Castell and Lyra Pencils and Schwann-Stabilo and Stadler. You have all these art supply companies that are in American art supply stores from that one town. It was a crossroads trading town, so they had a lot of pencil makers and a lot of brush companies. So Da Vinci, their whole goal has always been kind of quality over quantity. They really focused on just making the highest quality brushes they can, both for professional artists, the inspired amateur, and for students. We've made great strides, which I'll talk about later, in that area.

Speaker 1: 3:56

The Da Vinci brush line has been known as one of the finest brush lines out there, and I know that they make a lot of different series of brushes. What would you say are the top two or three most popular series of brushes that they make, and why are they so popular?

Speaker 2: 4:19

They make very unique synthetic brushes. It's the largest selection of brushes in the world made by any manufacturer. We're really one of the only factories left where we make every product and nothing is outsourced. So everything's made in our factory, from the raw material, the finished product. So that's kind of unique in art supplies today. They started making these really unique synthetic brushes in the 1970s and 80s and that's continued. So they've been very innovative in synthetic brush making. So what they started doing was they started blending different thicknesses of fibers together. They first came out with a brush called the Nova and then later on the Cosmotops bin and the Topacryl and these brushes, you know they take multiple different fibers and thicknesses at varying lengths. So they're still handmade and they're blending different thicknesses together. So they invented what's called the multidiometer synthetic.

Speaker 1: 5:23

So before that Wait, wait, wait The multidiometer synthetic. What does that mean?

Speaker 2: 5:30

So DaVinci was the first factory with synthetic brush making to take different thicknesses of synthetic fibers. First it was three different thicknesses with the Nova line, and then they came out with five different thicknesses with the Topacryl and the Cosmotops spin line. And what they did that was nobody had done before was they took different thicknesses of the fiber and blended them together in one brush. So you have five different thicknesses of the fiber. The thickest are on the outside and the thinnest are in the inside, and that created what's called capillary action, so water or color will move between the different thicknesses and different thicknesses of fibers. So they'll hold water for watercolor or hold paint and they'll distribute it more evenly. Before that synthetic brushes were just kind of mediocre because when you just have one diameter, the paint and the water just kind of didn't have anything to grab onto or hold onto. So by creating this way of doing synthetics which they keep very secret, these blends that they've done, they really makes our synthetics different. They're also not buying the same fibers as other manufacturers. They're developing fibers with the synthetic brush, the people who make the actual fibers. So they're unique to them. So you won't find the fibers we use in other brands of brushes. Our synthetics are completely unique. Yeah, and then later they took that a step further, about 10 years ago with a brush line called the Casanel for watercolor and Grigio for oil, where they started using crimped or crimped fiber. So it's what we call the new wave synthetics. They're wavy fiber synthetics, so those again just were able to hold even more water and really replicate. So we're getting closer and closer with these synthetics to replicating an actual natural hair brush, which has been the goal And also we started. We also started shaping the synthetic brushes as much as we could like natural hair, but sometimes we found it beneficial to change that a little bit so that the shaping of the brushes is also very unique so that maximize the benefits when you're using synthetic brushes.

Speaker 2: 8:07

Now, at this time a lot of manufacturers were making a blends, so they're making. You know you might have 50% sable or 50% synthetic And we never did that. We just either believed a brush should be natural hair to get all benefits of natural hair brush making, or because we were making these unique synthetics all synthetic. We only have one line of brushes where we do some blending. But yeah, these crimped fibers were the next wave and it's really kind of modern synthetic brush making that I don't think anybody else is doing. We also for the for all of our synthetic brush making we build. It's done by hand, but we also build our own machines. So we have machines for synthetic brush making that nobody else has. Da Vinci has a full machine shop in the basement of the factory. So all the machine, all the parts. We actually make the parts in the factory as well. So that's kind of the top secret area of the factory because we obviously don't want our competitors knowing what we're doing here.

Speaker 2: 9:16

And then this year we did something. We came out with a brush called the ColoNail And that's a synthetic Kalinsky brush which we've been working on for about five years. So that was the first brush that blends the wavy fiber with straight fibers in five different thicknesses. So this is the brush. We think that mimics Kalinsky sable better than any other brush. The Casano was a huge breakthrough for us with the wavy fiber. It's kind of. A lot of people use the term faux squirrel. We don't really use that term. We think it's a different fiber, a better brush. But that brush was a huge breakthrough. Artists loved it And especially the quill brushes, which is an old fashioned kind of brush hugely popular with the urban sketching movement, which has kind of come out of nowhere the last decade, and there are groups all over the world using our Casano brushes And they're very unique.

Speaker 2: 10:16

So, while we have this huge range of kind of the traditional natural hair brushes, the innovations we've made in synthetic brushmaking have been spectacular And I think we've really led the way in that And I've had. We have this big trade show in Frankfurt every year where the art supply manufacturers all come together from all over the world And I've had other brush manufacturers from China, india, sri Lanka, who make a lot of the brushes you find in the art supply stores these days. Tell me, we can't knock off your synthetic brushes, we don't know how you do it. So that's a bit reassuring And you know I think it's important as an artist when you walk into an art supply store to There's been so much consolidation in our industry of brands, buying other brands, and you don't really know who's making what, where it's being made, and you're always going to get a higher quality product. If you look at that, you know you look at a brand like Da Vinci, or you look at gambling for oil paints, or golden for acrylics or you know any brands like those where you know they are making the products. I think that's really important.

Speaker 2: 11:36

A you're also supporting family owned independent businesses, which is a good thing, but I think it's important just to kind of do a little bit of research and see is that company making that product? because I'm going to tell you, 90% of the brushes that are in art supply stores Are made in India, china, sri Lanka, and they have somebody's name stamped on them. So these brands are not actually actually any brushes, they're just being made for them, and what that's led to is kind of a very generic selection of brushes where before that, you know, 4050 years ago, you had all these different brands making brushes and they were all competing against each other to make the best brush they could. So it kind of kept pushing the bar like making the brushes better and better and better. But then larger companies came in and bought these companies and you have one, one manufacturer in India who makes, i would say, 75% of the brushes in an art supply store. You walk into these days and art, yeah, and are the brushes great? Hey, but you know, as an art supply importer, as an art supply manufacturer and the retailer. You know the retailer. What they for their success?

Speaker 2: 12:57

When somebody's just starting to paint, they want to give the artist a great brush to use, because if they buy something not well made, that's, you know, maybe cut corners, it's not. It's not going to give them a great experience and I might turn them off to painting Where, if you buy something that makes the job, the painting, easier, you can watch an online video on. The brush performs beautifully and it lasts its shape And a lot of care has gone into making it They're just going to have a better experience and hopefully they're going to keep painting. So that's kind of that's our overall job. I mean, if you're building a house, you wouldn't want to buy the cheapest hammer you could because that would be very frustrating experience. So we're trying to feel Yeah, we feel it's kind of the same analogy with with brushes and getting people to paint and really enjoy painting with a good tool.

Speaker 1: 13:58

So let me jump in and let's just assume for a moment and let's go into different things here. If someone was just starting out in acrylics which of the what, what two brush lines would you suggest they start with?

Speaker 2: 14:15

Well, for acrylics we have the classic line we have is called the top acrylic And this is synthetic line. That's the five diameter synthetic. That's our best seller in North America overall. So long handled brushes Generally, you know, we say the short handle brushes are watercolor gouache and the long handled brushes are oil and acrylic. Now artists break those rules all the time. Oh yeah, we have the. We have the Cosmotop spin line and short handle which many acrylic painters use, but the shaping is a little different. So for the long hammer brushes we will shape the brushes so they're more inherent to painting with oil or acrylic.

Speaker 2: 14:55

So we have the top acrylic which has really a lot of a snap. It's got the five diameter synthetics I was talking about earlier. The way it's constructed is very unique And we make that brush course and round bright filbert slant a fan. So the next brush after the top acrylic we have for acrylic painters is the Grecio. This is the crimped fiber synthetic brush we've made It'll mark the paint layers a little bit more like a traditional hog bristle brush, has a little bit different feel from the top of curl. We also make a brush called the impasto And this is the thickest fiber, the most rugged brush, we make the absolute stiffest. Some people say it feels like a flexible painting knife. So a lot of times when acrylic painters come in and they say, oh, i'm so hard on my brushes, i just thrashed, you know, this is the super rugged brush, the impasto.

Speaker 2: 15:53

And then we make a wide range of Mottlers, which are extra wide brushes, you know, for anywhere from one inch up to 20 inches in the top of curl Line, cosmotop, a Mottler. Yeah, that's a specialty of ours. If you Google Da Vinci Mottlers and a lot of acrylic painters just absolutely love these brushes and buy them, buy them all up. I've had Mark Golden tell me many times that the series 5040 top acrylic Mottler is his favorite Da Vinci brush, which is very nice. And yeah, we have a huge, a huge range of acrylic painting brushes. So those are just. Those are just a few.

Speaker 1: 16:33

Let's jump over into the watercolors. What watercolor brushes would you recommend? Let's say that they're beginners, or they've been painting for a little while and just want to have something that's going to perform better for them. Which range of watercolor brushes, jeff We?

Speaker 2: 16:47

make natural air brushes And in those the most popular are the classic Kalinsky sable brushes. Kalinsky sable brushes we still have a huge range of those in every shape you can imagine round, flats, liners, sign painting. We make the whole brushes in Kalinsky sable. We also make the classic squirrel brushes which are a little softer. A lot of people use them. They call them mops or wash brushes And that line is called the petite gris per the squirrel brushes. We also make a brush line called the Cosmetop Mix and this kind of combines the sable and squirrel. This is the only blend we make. It has a little bit of synthetic in it So you can buy the bigger sizes for a lower price. So if you wanted to buy a Kalinsky sable number 12 and it's just too expensive, you could buy the Cosmetop Mix in the number 12. And we have a lot of watercolor painters that are flower painters that love this brush because they can buy a size 12 or a 16 or a 20 or even a 30. Huge brush And those are very popular with watercolorists. Moving on to synthetic brushes for watercolor we make the Cosmetop Spin. This has been our traditional bestseller. It's a five diameter synthetic. It's the first one we made. The Mottler wash brush is incredibly popular And we have all the shapes you know round, flat liners And this is kind of, you know, a good entry level watercolor brush. It's not too expensive but it's still kind of a professional watercolor brush. It's going to give you great results.

Speaker 2: 18:30

Then 10 years ago we made a brush called the Casanel. This is more like an imitation squirrel brush. It's the first crimped fiber synthetic. So that was a new technology we came up with. It holds a ton of water. We sell a lot of quill brushes in this line And if you told me 10 years ago a quill brush with the copper wire longer length is going to be one of the best selling brush I have, overall, i would have said there's no way that's possible. But the online classes, youtube, so many ways for artists to see how to use the brushes. Now they're no longer intimidated by the quills. And in the Casanel line we saw a huge amount of quills, huge amount of travel brushes to the urban sketching community people who are going out and sketching together all over the United States, all over the world really, which has been incredible.

Speaker 2: 19:25

And then the last line we've launched recently in synthetics called ColoNail. This is a line we've worked on for a long time. It's synthetic Kalinsky, so trying to mimic Kalinsky sable. It's the first brush that we've combined the crimped fiber and the straight fiber together. We had never done that before And we really. It has a beautiful handle. We really think we've come up with something special and it's been out just since the beginning of 2023. And we already have it, i think, in 300 stores worldwide, all over the world. It's been an enormous hit. But this is also because people had such success with the previous launch of the Casanel that I talked about previously that the dealers had a lot of faith that this next that brush was so successful that the dealers fed a lot of faith the art supply retailers. I should say that this is going to be a great brush too.

Speaker 2: 20:18

So many of them bought it just after hearing about it via the website or email, and you can look at all these brushes up at DaVinci-Defit. That's the name of the family that owns the company DaVinci-Defitcom. We have a brand new website. You can follow us at DaVinci brushes North America. That's my Instagram feed, and we also have on your phone.

Speaker 2: 20:49

We have a DaVinci app which shows you all the brushes. We have a one minute video for every brush we make so you can see how the brush is used. So we call them demo clips and they've been great because they're not too long. We have longer videos. We're going to get to see the whole factory. It's a brush tour of the factory. We learn a lot about brush making. But really for each series we just have one of these 45 second to one minute videos to show you how to use the brush. So you can see all those on the DaVinci phone app, which you can get on any of the platforms, and it shows you literally everything The measurements of the brushes, anything you'd want to know about a brush you're using is on there And that's been great for artists and people who work in art supply stores love that because then they can customer as a question. They can literally just look on the app, look on an iPad and learn all about that particular brush.

Speaker 1: 21:47

So if our audience wants to see if there is a store around them, can they go to your website And see what stores in their local area carry your brushes?

Speaker 2: 22:04

Again on that website I just mentioned DaVinci-defitcom Any brush you look at, there's a where to buy link.

Speaker 1: 22:12

When I was looking through your website, i noticed some very unique brushes that I don't think many of our artists or our audience out there have seen, and I want to just ask you about a couple of them. One was called a pipe overgrainer. What the heck's a pipe overgrainer?

Speaker 2: 22:35

Yeah, i just did an event for the Society of Decorative Painters And in San Francisco it's called the Salon and they do it all over the world in a different city every year, and these are people who are doing very unique kind of faux finishing. They're doing marbling techniques, so creating kind of imitation marble. They're also using it for some striping techniques, woodgrainings, making woodgrain, and we still make all of these brushes. So I mean, this is a category that's kind of you know we have a lot of niches. You'll find in our catalog. You'll see these pipe overgrainers for, like I said, woodgraining, faux marble. We also have a full range of sign painting brushes. We have dagger striping brushes for pin striping, we have faux finishing brushes, we have gilding brushes, gold leaf brushes. So we make all of these brushes that really nobody else makes anymore And that kind of goes towards the whole Da Vinci mantra of quality over quantity.

Speaker 2: 23:38

So we still have artists that you know or artisans that want these kind of brushes. We have them for them And you know, artists just love us for this. I mean, we just came out with a new print catalog. We have a great website that I've mentioned, but you know anybody can email me at Greg, at GregDanielscom, and if they'd like a new print catalog. We have a beautiful new print catalog we can send them to, which is a bit old fashioned, but it seems like people love getting the print catalog. It's been a big hit.

Speaker 1: 24:08

I also saw that there was a pastel brush. What is a?

Speaker 2: 24:13

pastel brush. That's just a blending brush. These are kind of items when you see them in our catalog. Generally somebody's come to us and said, can you make us a brush for this? So they've come to us and they wanted a blending brush for pastels. We've actually now got two or three of them And these brushes are all made by artists or quests And then generally if we've made them we'll put them in the catalog.

Speaker 2: 24:40

I mean it's another reason we make almost all of our series. Jeff, we'll make some brushes from size, you know, 20-ot, the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest up to 50. So we have from the smallest to the largest in our Mottlers. We make brushes from one inch up to 20 inches wide. I mean nobody's really making these brushes anymore For oil painters.

Speaker 2: 25:10

I mean we make a lot of oil painting brushes. We have our classic interlocked Hog Bristle brush which is beautiful, quality, called the Maestro II. You know, and when you think about Hog Bristle you're thinking Van Gogh is the classic. You know Hog Bristle, user, where you're seeing all the strokes and the painting Lucian Freud, the big figurative nudes. You know, if you see all those brush strokes in there, that's all Hog Bristle. We make the classic Kalinsky oil painting brush for detail. And you know blending We make a beautiful line old-fashioned style brush called the Black Sable That one will give you.

Speaker 2: 25:47

It'll mark the paint like a bristle brush, but a little bit smoother. You can do fine blending. Portrait painters love it, realist painters. So you know we have. I talked a little bit about the synthetics, but we have a huge line of natural hair painting brushes, both for watercolor gouache oil. We have ox hair brushes for in Italy they're super popular for tempera painting and fresco painting. So you name it, you name it, we have it, you know, and the encourage artists to go check it out on the website. And because it's really that's what first drew me to the brand was I just found it was exciting that somebody was still making all of these brushes.

Speaker 1: 26:26

Because, often.

Speaker 2: 26:27

You know, in the past, for instance, there's a classic example. You know I mean, Jeff, i know you were in the arts play industry and you know one time there was this huge catalog of American brushes called Grumbacher And if you had the Grumbacher catalog it had every, every brush you could possibly imagine. And then they were bought by the Sharpie marker company in the 1980s And they eliminated about 70% of the line because maybe those didn't sell. They just kept the top 30%. So the you know, this huge range of brushes just disappeared literally in a year And unfortunately that's what's happened with a lot of the companies that get sold in the arts play industry.

Speaker 2: 27:06

You know, you start looking at people who don't know much about art supplies. They're looking on a spreadsheet. They see these are the top 20 sellers, these are the bottom 80 sellers, and they keep the top 20, eliminate the bottom 80. And you have a lot of beautiful products that just get eliminated based on sales figures, not really on what does the artist need, what does the artist want and who are these specialists that are using certain brushes that really rely on them? I mean, davinci also has a little motto called we are the specialist for the specialists. So we have a lot of people that are doing specialty painting techniques that really rely on us for these kind of brushes. We don't wanna let them down.

Speaker 1: 27:54

DaVinci Brush has been around for a hundred years and we're kinda coming to the end of our time here, but we could talk brushes probably for two hours with the amount of brushes that DaVinci offers. And it doesn't matter if you're a beginner you're in the middle of it or of your art quest, or if you are a fine artist or a fine crafter. Davinci has the brush for all of them right, they do.

Speaker 2: 28:27

And just in closing, i wanna say one other thing is we go to great lengths also. They built a new factory in 2006, a second new factory in 2013, and these factories were built with complete green ecology, green manufacturing, non-polluting. They're built on the city grid in Nuremberg, so there's no pollution, they're completely up to compliance and all of our brush handles, for instance, are also from sustainable forests in the Baltic states, mostly Lithuania and from sustainable European forestry. So we're really trying to do everything we can to be eco, green manufacturing and to be as sustainable as possible, which is absolutely.

Speaker 1: 29:20

These are absolutely important topics for the world we live in these days, wow well, greg, you've given our audience so much incredible information and again give them the website address if they wanna go and see these wonderful products wwwDaVinci-Deffitcom.

Speaker 2: 29:45

That's the family that is the owners of DaVinci, and you can find Instagram DaVinci brushes North America. If you have any questions, you can email me, greg at GregDanielscom about any brush questions you have and, like I said, we have a new print catalog. Greg, thank you again for being on the show today, jeff having me, it was nice to see you again after all these years.

Speaker 1: 30:07

Thank you. You've been listening to the Art Supply Insiders. Check back with us often as we talk about the world of art and craft supplies. If you'd like to hear more of these podcasts, please hit the subscribe button on your preferred podcast platform and we really would appreciate it if you tell a friend. If you'd like to see more of this kind of content, please go to our website at Art Supply Insiders and hit the support button. Now go out and create something.