"Paintings With Personality"

I really like to draw, and have been doing a lot of it lately. I call this man I saw writing in Central Park "Making Notes." I especially like drawing people who have lived life and earned the privilege of sitting in the park and enjoying the day. They have earned every wrinkle and every white hair they have.

“I can’t find anything!” It seems a lot of items I thought I really needed walked away when I moved to my new studio. They went the way of lost socks and other sundry items.  I was finally getting used to my new studio space, when I decided I needed a better storage system. “Harbor Freight” had a great cabinet on sale, so I headed over there and came home with “two cabinets” that were going to be perfect. I couldn’t wait to get my supplies put away in their new places. Now, I’m all finished and… “I can’t find anything!”

Some things in art need to be lost, but supplies aren’t one of them. I’m thinking about lost edges. By edges, I mean the places where one shape ends and another begins. Edges aren’t limited to separate objects, but include the borders within objects as well. It’s a common mistake to create sharp edges everywhere, like you were making a coloring book. What you really see when you focus your eyes on something is clearly defined edges, but in your peripheral vision everything is slightly blurred.

There are some painters, especially beginning painters, who define all edges equally. They don’t understand that no one sees everything in front of them with sharp focus, so their difficulty is in painting the things they aren’t focusing on. More experienced painters are aware of the tendency to make every edge equally sharp, and therefore carefully avoid making that mistake in their work.

A painter makes some edges hard so they will stand out from the rest of the painting and grab the viewer’s attention, but making all the edges sharp causes the painting to appear rigid and gives no sense of space or distance. Losing some edges creates more visual impact and keeps objects from appearing isolated and “cut-out.” When every edge in a painting is sharp, the painting doesn’t look natural. That isn’t the way we see things and our brains become overwhelmed.

Losing edges and linking shapes are powerful tools and important in designing a composition. You can change your paintings to your own unique expression just by handling the edges differently. And, what might have been a mediocre painting will become exciting.

To figure out which edges to lose, simply squint your eyes. Large shapes and sharp edges are clearer. Look for the obvious contrasts and for the areas that merge. The strong contrasts will be your hard edges, and the shapes that merge in value will be your lost edges. When you paint, don’t forget what you saw when you were squinting.

How do you decide which edges to lose and which ones to keep? Please comment below. 

Later, Judy

www.judyballance.com