Life on the Edge

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Detail from Joaquin Sorolla’s Vision of Spain

One of the most important tools a painter can learn to recognize and employ is the artistic placement of edges. All great representational painters past and present have employed masterful edges in their paintings and fully understood why and how to use them to create the illusion of three dimensions. To illustrate just one example, we have marked some of the hard and soft edges in the detail above from a panel of Joaquin Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. It shows how he manipulated edges to build the sense of reality in his paintings. Notice the soft vs. hard edges and the kinds of brush strokes used to make them. Look how he often turns his forms not by value changes, but by varying the apparent softness of his edges within a shape as he changes color temperature. He painted this series of large canvases on location, en plein air. Magnifico!

Every object we see has a variety of edges, either sharp or blurry, bright …