Edges

“I found an edge! I found an edge! It’s right here!”

not

The strongest sig­nal of what is in focus, and what is within foveal vision, is the hard edge. Out­side of the eye’s focal point, and out­side of foveal vision, all edges are blurred. Within that zone, any edges that have a strong value tran­si­tion are empha­sized and used by the visual sys­tem to develop a con­cep­tual model of three-dimensional visual space.

Painters have the abil­ity to con­trol the sharp­ness of any edge they wish. An edge can be sharp, com­pletely blurred, or some­where in between. Over the course of it’s length, you can make an edge change from hard to soft and back to hard again. You can also “lose” an edge by hav­ing it blend into it’s back­ground, present only by infer­ence. The sys­tem­atic use of hard, soft, and lost edges is a pow­er­ful tool for com­po­si­tion and con­trol of the path the viewer’s eye as it trav­els through­out the paint­ing. Because the eye is attracted by hard edges, you can enhance the hard­ness of what­ever you want the viewer to look at more. You can make visual path­ways of hard edges that define how the eye enters the pic­ture and moves around it. You can sug­gest shape by mak­ing reced­ing edges softer. You can cre­ate a sense of mys­tery and visual engage­ment by hid­ing some edges, requir­ing the viewer to par­tic­i­pate in the process of cre­at­ing the pic­ture by inter­po­lat­ing edges where you haven’t actu­ally painted them.

Prior to the devel­op­ment of the Venet­ian style of paint­ing in the early 16^th cen­tury (Bellini, Gior­gione, Tit­ian), edges were usu­ally painted hard, except where soft tran­si­tions were required to rep­re­sent soft forms, forms in shadow, forms in the dis­tance, or turn­ing edges. The Venet­ian school painters (and all of the vast num­ber of artist influ­enced by them, such as Rem­brandt, Rubens, Velázquez, and just about every­one since then) devel­oped ways to use edges as a com­po­si­tional device. If you paint all edges except those around your focal point as soft, then the eye is nat­u­rally drawn to that area. If you paint objects that are closer to the viewer as hav­ing harder edges, then those objects appear closer and you effec­tively define the three-dimensional space of the pic­ture. If you paint a vari­ety of hard, soft, and lost edges, you increase the com­plex­ity of the paint­ing and invite the viewer to explore the composition.

Some­day, I’ll be able to con­sis­tently make all that work in my com­po­si­tions. In the mean­time, it helps to under­stand the the­ory, study paint­ings that use edges effec­tively (such as those by Ingres, for exam­ple), and become more con­scious of how I use edges in composition.