A brush is a drawing tool for filling in areas. It is used for painting the background of rectangles, ellipses, etc. It has a colour and a style - the style may be wxSOLID (normal) or wxTRANSPARENT (the brush isn't used). On a monochrome display, the default behaviour is to show all brushes as white unless the colour is really black. If you wish the policy to be 'all non-white colours are black', as with pens, uncomment the piece of code documented in SetBrush in wx_dc.cc. Alternatively, set the Colour member of the device context to TRUE, and select appropriate colours.
Do not initialize objects on the stack before the program commences, since other required structures may not have been set up yet. Instead, define global pointers to objects and create them in OnInit or when required.
An application may wish to create brushes with different characteristics dynamically, and there is the consequent danger that a large number of duplicate brushes will be created. Therefore an application may wish to get a pointer to a brush by using the global list of brushes wxTheBrushList, and calling the member function FindOrCreateBrush. See wxBrushList and wxDC.