All About Edges: Using Them to Capture Art Collectors

By: Linda Riesenberg Fisler

Edges, described by David Leffel, are the “soul of the painting.”   When I asked Carolyn Anderson to do the show on edges, part of her response included this wonderful tidbit.  “Most people don’t realize that how we see and what we see is interpreted by the brain, which, by and large, doesn’t pay too much attention to the quality of the edge.”   Not paying too much attention to an edge is typically where we get in trouble and can say so much to a judge about where you are in your artistic journey.   (Note: You can watch our Art Chat here )

A hard edge will stop the eye.  If we have too many hard edges, our eye stops and starts too many times, like going through a flashing red light in an intersection, and the viewer gets tired and confused too quickly. A soft edge allows the viewer to be calm, their eye savoring the halftone or easy transition further into the painting.  Lost and found edges are a great tool to erase a line.  They engage the brain to finish the form and create interest for the viewer.

Nicholai Fechin was one past master of edges and typically placed his hard edge where he wanted the viewer to stop in his painting.  In the painting below, the hard edge of the woman’s profile draws our attention to her face.  The background and facial features use softer edges to invite the user to explore more.  While there may be some hard edges in other areas of the painting, Fechin uses the hardest edge with contrast to draw the viewer in and around his work. The woman’s right shoulder disappears into the drapery background; her left shoulder has no definite distinction either.  The center of focus is the face, and secondary is the body and its language, the way she is sitting there confidently.  The use of edges provides us with so much information!

Study the image above; you’ll find all three types of edges in the painting.

Softer edges can be created in several ways. One way is to create a halftone between two values. Placing two colors of the same value can also form a soft edge with a delicate touch, and a little “mushing” of colors is always helpful.

Examine the slice out of my “Tigger Bear” painting above.  No hard edges here and still form is maintained.  You know it is a cat’s ear, down the side of the face, neck, and back.  The goal of this painting was to use color within the same value to define the form with soft edges so the eye could enjoy the color calmly.  Check out a black and white of the above color image to study this effect.

Lost and Found edges are a wonderful tool to use when you want to eliminate the line in a painting but want to convey a path for the eye to travel.  Here’s an example of a lost and found edge in the painting below where I wanted to convey a curb on a street.  The line that forms the curb has two purposes.  One was to move the eye from left to right, but more importantly, from the past to the present/future in time.  Also, note directly below the black and white image.

Edge attention becomes very important for those who love to paint with palette knives.  Hard edges are easy to create with a palette knife.  If there are too many hard edges, the painting becomes choppy, and the eye tires as it stops and starts throughout the painting.  It is as if your mind is shouting “Enough already!”

Both of these paintings were created with palette knives. Attention to edges differs greatly. The painting on the left is a bit noisy and choppy, while the one on the right creates a calm area where the eye can rest and explore. This, in turn, calms and entices the eye to explore the trees in the foreground, leading the eye to the soft highlights at the base of the mountains, a little payoff for exploring the scene.

Keep in mind how you see.  Hold your hand up in front of you.  Focus your attention on your hand.  Look at the detail and sharpness of your hand.  Without changing your focus on your hand, notice the softness and blurriness of the shapes/objects around your hand.  This is important to understand.  How you see is what you want to paint.  Notice the edges in the unfocused areas.  Notice the edges of the focused area.

To understand more, I invite you to follow along while creating “The View from Ben Lomand.” 

The Journey: Creating the View from Ben Lomond

Laying in the Foundation Color to Finish

My followers on social media love to watch the painting unfold, and I post about the progress of my paintings from time to time.  This 30 X 40 oil on canvas painting was a journey, much like the hike we were on that inspired the painting, there were lots of rocks to climb, experimentation, exploration and the feeling of accomplishment at the end of the painting.  I thought that you might like to read the thoughts I had and what I did during this whole process. 

I start out most of my paintings with a grey scale drawing to map out the placement and start my thought process on what effects and techniques I want to use in the painting.  Where I want the focus to be is in color relationships, value plan, and light direction.  I check the drawing, and I usually draw the painting several times in my head before I even pick up a pencil. It is interesting from time to time that the values end up flipping when I start adding color.  I usually want the value to be the same, but the temperature to be either warmer or cooler.  You’ll see where this happened as I worked through this painting.

Here’s the beginning greyscale:

Next, I started to paint in the local colors.  Here’s the base of the mountains in the back.

I already had arguments with myself over what values to use, and you can see where I flipped a value on the mountain in the center of the painting (known as Walters Peak).

With the back mountains based in, I took my palette knife and began lying in loads of paint in the mountains.  In hindsight, this was way too soon to do this. Yes, even I make mistakes, and I thought sharing this painting would help you. This painting was created very early in my palette knife experimentation.  I still had not decided on the final features I wanted to highlight, and I should have laid them in front with the same level of paint.   However, this step did get me thinking about how I wanted the mountains in the background to appear. There were too many lines and edges that needed softening.

I continued to play with the mountains in the back and not worried about the foreground at this point.  Still too many hard edges for how soft I wanted the mountains (Cecil Peak and Walters Peak) to be.  This got me thinking about glazing and dry brushing.  Would it work here?  I had abandoned those techniques a long time ago but felt the need to explore with them again.

I worked mostly on the foreground during the next session (the photo above), bringing it to the same level of “doneness” as the background.   The sky was too busy and didn’t feel like it was adding depth and entirely too many hard edges.  This is where I decided it was time to dry brush and glaze to see what I could pull out of this painting.  Push and Explore!  Push and Explore!  They are oils!  Oils are a forgiving medium!  Always ask what if?  Build it up and break it down.

This is where the painting began to live and detour from my reference completely! I glazed and dry brushed–sometimes realizing the two don’t mix (duh!), and the sky drove me nuts.  I had too many stars trying to grab the spotlight, and so the glazing and dry brush were helping me determine what I wanted to happen where.  I also stepped back and asked myself if I had two distinct paintings.  I began to question how I could pull them together in one painting. I like the moodiness of this stage.  I also started to place the pine trees to see if I could find a joining point between the foreground and background. 

The photo of the painting above is the result of my thoughts on pulling the two areas.  I loved the pine trees and the playfulness of the foreground.  But, I needed to get the viewer to look into the mountains in the background to explore the soft edges and colors there.  While I felt I had pulled them together with the high-reaching pines, it still lacked something for me.  It was beginning to feel overworked.

So, I remembered what David Leffel said about overworked paintings: “The problem with overworked paintings is they lack a center of focus.” It still isn’t one painting, and how can I get the viewer to look into it?

Above is the finished work.  I added reflections on Lake Wakatipu that led us back to Walter’s Peak.  Below the peaks are little touches representing the plantation that the TSS Earnslaw steams passengers and visitors to daily.  The sky has a playful feel created by glazings of permanent rose, cad yellow, and white.  The dark clouds above Cecil Peak (the first peak on the left) bothered me to no end (look at the strong line in the painting above).  The thick paint was still sticky from the previous day’s work.  I just started glazing, applying thick paint, taking a paper towel, and dabbling with it.  It gave me the feeling I was looking for and got rid of that hideous dark line that was bothering me.

At last, I felt like the painting was coming together. There are some great resting areas for the viewer and thick, juicy paint to be explored.  The passage in the front with the warmer colors invites us into the painting–as if we are standing on the Ben Lomond, taking in the view, looking down Lake Wakatipu to Cecil and Walter’s Peak.  The pine trees lead us down to the lake, and the reflections lead us back to the plantation at the base of the mountains. Playful, soft colors keep us interested in the mountains in the background, which leads us to interesting cloud formations.   Back to the two pines that lead us back down to our viewing point and then lead back into another progression through the painting.  There is even some mystery in the work.  The exploration and pushing color were well worth the effort.  Never stop asking what if!?