White Roses Edges. Artists, especially art students, think and talk a lot about edges. With great intensity they discuss the merits of soft edges and hard edges, warm and cool edges, edges between positive and negative spaces. They become very important as a compositional elements, directing the viewer over the surface of the painting as if guiding them through a maze. I don’t mind a good edge from time to time but I don’t see as many edges as most artists. In my paintings edges exist only where two planes meet. The top of a table meeting the front, for example, or the where the two side planes of a book meet. In White Roses the only edge is where the cloth lays flat on the tabletop and then drops over the front plane. There are no edges to the flowers or the vase, the leaves, stems or drapery. There is no edge to a rounded form. A rose has no edge. Many artists see an edge where the rose meets the background. The form, as I see it, turns away from the viewer but has no edge. It does not meet the background, there is space between the two. There is a change of color, value and texture where the eye loses the flower and picks up the background but it is not an edge. An edge would exist only if the flower were pressed against the background. The glass vase also turns and has no edge. Where the vertical plane of the vase meets the horizontal plane of the tabletop there would be an edge but that is hidden by the drapery. You might argue that my definition of an edge is a bit too literal, but I would say that it is not literal but liberating. By limiting my edges to true edges I allow my painting to express a greater variety of forms, more space, breadth and atmosphere.....
3 comments:
loving "White Roses"
My argument would be not so much that your definition of an edge is too literal, per se, but that it is conversely not literal enough. My little desktop widget, of the Oxford American variety, states simply that by definition, an edge is the 'outside limit of an object, area, or surface'. So make no mistake, the images in your paintings have edges, and uses them quite well in my opinion. Your glass vase doesn't need to be in contact with another object to possess an edge. An edge doesn't translate automatically into an absence of visual depth. The outside limit of your vase, regardless of how round it might be and how much distance there exists between it and a flat wall or background behind it, does create very much an edge in the truest sense. This applies even in an instance such as the visual device that occurs on the right shoulder, if you will, of the aforementioned glass vase. This could be a mostly hidden leaf or element of the rose ensemble emanating from the vase itself, but there is a dark greenish brown line that clearly defines an edge in the composition and in this case clearly separates through the power of value changes the glass vase from a shadow seemingly cast upon the background. But even without such compositional devises as pure line, I would point out by true literal definition, there exists very much an edge between a rounded object such as your vase and a background or cloth arrangement upon which your vase sits, however much depth of space lying between the two. I enjoy most, by the way, a very playful and energetic looseness to this piece.
Very well stated Ron. Of course everything has an edge, otherwise it would cease to exist as an object. My thoughts about edges, perhaps I should call them artistic edges, are useful to the artist when creating the illusion of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. I am painting an illusion of a vase and not creating a literal vase. I cannot literally paint space or weight or texture but endeavor to paint the illusion that they exist on my two dimensional surface. In order to give the illusion that my vase is a round form I prefer to have my thinking continue around the form rather than stop where the eye stops. The vase has a front edge and back edge in addition to the left and right edges that you see, but no artist would call the front or back of an object an edge. My conception of an edge may not conform to the Oxford American dictionary definition of an edge but it is quite useful for my artistic purposes. Thanks so much for reading my blog and for your thoughtful comment.
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