Speaking of Art Blog

When rendering a painting or drawing, attention to edges of objects and shapes (or the lack thereof) can make or break a piece. It is also a finer skill that comes only after an artist has mastered many other skills, such as accurate drawing or successfully composing a piece of artwork. I am still learning about edges.

Before this spring, I thought I understood what lost and found edges mean, when speaking about features in a painting. I was taught that a found edge is where there is a distinct, noticeable edge on a shape, which spells out its boundary. The outer edge on the head of this chipmunk in my painting, Backyard Chirper, would be an example of a found edge. Usually you want to reserve the darkest dark edge against the lightest light for your center of interest.

In contrast, a lost edge is where the distinction between where one edge ends and another one begins is blurred, with the color of one shape smearing into the other shape’s edge. The result is that the viewer is not attracted to that edge, and thus the edge recedes and is “lost”. Lost edges work great to make background objects do just that – stay in the background. Our eyes look for distinct edges when we look at a scene, so a lost edge will naturally recede. Conversely, if everything in a painting has a distinct, sharp “found” edge with sharp contrasts between light & dark, then there is no focal point, no center of interest.  Something has to recede in order for something else to come forward and take center stage. In my painting titled Beach Day Finale, you can see that some of the edges of the sand piles that border the dune grass simply disappear and are not as distinct as others. 

Like I wrote, I THOUGHT I understood what those two terms mean. Then I attended the International Association of Pastel Societies Convention this spring where I had a one-on-one critique with Desmond O’Hagan, an instructor with Pro Art Critique, www.proartcritique.com. Such a useful critique! Desmond gave me a number of compliments, with one main bit of advice – I needed to pay better attention to my lost and found edges. He explained what he meant by the terms, which is exactly how I understood them to be defined already. But I came away with a real dilemma. Desmond’s painting style, loose and impressionistic, translates very easily to smudging and smearing some edges to make them “lost”. But with my tight, realistic approach, there isn’t a direct translation. If I smudge and smear my edges in a close up painting of a bird, for instance, well I’ve just lost my realistic style. 

So after I returned home I studied the still life work of my new pastel friend, Lisa Ober, www.lisaober.com, on her website. Her work is the epitome of what I am trying to achieve in my work – tight, photo realistic, with all seeming found edges, but still with a center of interest. So how does she do that? Then a conversation I had with my artist friend Mark Vander Vinne, www.vandervinnestudio.com, suddenly made everything snap into place.  I had a hunch about something and I confirmed it by talking to Mark. 

Mark told me he categorizes all edges into THREE categories – hard, soft, and lost. For him, a hard edge is the same as what I’ve been calling a found edge, and a soft edge is the same as what I’ve been calling a lost edge. But for Mark, a lost edge is neither of those; it is still a distinct edge, but its value (lightness/darkness) is the same as what is next to it, which makes its edge become lost because it simply blends in with what it is next to and the two shapes read as one shape. Ta-da! That’s what Lisa Ober does. That’s how she gets some edges to recede. They are distinct, but some of them are the same value as their neighbor, so they blend in with their neighbor and their distinct edge is no longer noticeable. Yesss!

Actually, I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I just never raised my awareness of the distinction to my conscious thought until now, and that is exactly what I needed to do in order to effectively continue to intentionally do it in the future. Here is an example of lost edges (as Mark defines the term) in my painting, Beautiful Preener. Those stacked feathers that I’ve circled do not take center stage because they are all the same value in each grouping, so their edges become “lost”. 

So what am I left with? Hard, soft, and lost edges. In my work and with my style, I’ll probably be using mostly hard and lost edges, not as much soft. But at least I know now how to effectively translate Desmond’s advice into MY artistic language. Edges, edges, they are a tricky lot, even when an artist simply tries to talk about them!