Tell us about your practice and how you came to making?

We both have been longtime makers and are lucky to come from families where working with your hands is valued and encouraged. As individual artists, we’ve collaborated on small projects in the past, but we’ve found the Brush Company to be really captivating, which is why it’s continued to grow over the years. Our goal has always been to design things that are fun to make and exciting to use.

Do you have a ritual when it comes to making/designing work?

Because we both have full-time jobs, the Brush Company work usually happens on weekends and evenings. We have a shared studio in Philadelphia that we go to together a few days a week to work on our individual and shared practice. One of the things that makes our collaboration work is that we each have our own lanes. We can work independently and then come together to share our thoughts, compare sketches, and daydream. We both riff off each other: a new pattern for the beaded handle can inspire a new ceramic shape, and so on.

Functionality and whimsy, two core themes of your practice, seem to pull in opposite directions; yet your pieces feel like a coherent collection. How do you use color, form, and texture to hold those two impulses together?

During COVID, when this project started, we were trying to find and make things that made us happy and made our space feel safe and joyful. Since then, I think we both have adopted an attitude that functionality and whimsy can and should go together. Functional doesn’t mean boring! Our approach to bridging those two ideas is to start with simple, streamlined forms and then mess them up with funky additions or maximalist color combinations.

The brush sits at the center of your practice, but you've grown into tiles, mugs, magnets, and more. What is it about the brush specifically that became the anchor, and how do you decide when a new object belongs in the world of The Brush Company?

The brush is at the center simply because it excites us the most! In a more abstract way it also encapsulates our approach to making. Our brushes are sort of oddities: they’re not wooden, so they have a different weight and appearance than normal hand brushes, and they have these over-the-top ornate beaded handles. We love that this brings whimsy and a certain level of decadence, while also staying incredibly functional and streamlined. 

That is one of the ways we know if a new design or object fits into the family, if it captures that combo of extra-ness and function. We usually know right away if we’re going down the right path when making something new.

Your entire process — from design to production — is a collaboration between the two of you, drawing on different craft backgrounds. How does that division of expertise actually work in practice, and does it ever create productive friction?

It’s been really fun to collaborate on these projects and to find our niche within the different products. We’ve taken the approach that neither of us needs to become the expert in what the other is working on, but rather we can trust the other’s knowledge of the material that they’ve spent years honing. Productive friction has been helpful to push each other to think through designs or processes.

Your work draws on a pretty specific constellation of references — Ellsworth Kelly, Memphis Group, Fiestaware, Art Deco mosaics. What draws you to sources that span fine art, industrial design, and vernacular objects, and how does a reference actually make its way into a piece?

Speaking broadly, we are attracted to color and the impact it has on a space. A really impactful inspiration is an Ellsworth Kelly painting in the SFMOMA that’s a pair of orange squares that are so bright it hurts to look at them for a long time. The way we synthesize our references is to try and distill some of that power into something that can fit into our apartment. Whether it's the lines of an Art Deco mural or the whimsy of a Sottsass dresser, how can we make something small enough to hold in your hand that still emits a wallop of color.

Is there anything you’ve dreamed of making, but haven’t yet?

We seem to have settled on a solid POV for the Brush Company, and it’s made it easy to apply that to other objects besides brushes. I think both of us are interested in upping our scale and making larger sculptural objects. As always, functionality is pretty central to our thought process, so it would be exciting to see projects like a fountain or a more permanent tile installation. Our long-term dream is to buy a house and make a million little whimsical alterations.

What’s next for you?

Production mode! It’s been an exciting past year, and we’ve been so thankful to have sold out of a lot of our brushes. We’re looking forward to making more designs in the Brush Company world, like mugs, lamps, tiles, and candles. We have a show opening next year, so we’re going to be working on making larger-scale objects for the exhibition.