I would draw our attention back to Angela’s painting in her recent post. I find the distinctions between the tower-like figure and the enveloping background/atmosphere to be very well rendered. There’s a strong psychological element there for me.

June, is your interest in softer edges an important reason you’re recently favoring painting over fabric art?

Indeed, you are making an art of contrasting the textures and edges, hard and soft — your example is perfect.

I’m wondering (and I should do my homework, but am hoping someone else might find it intriguing) if you put your hard edges into Photoshop and ratcheted up the resolution until you could see the pixels clearly, whether the number of intermediate pixels would be one or ten or 100. I became convinced that edges were a lot softer than I was “seeing” them when I did this to a color photograph and found an astonishing variety of colors in that area between definitive foreground and definitive background.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take myself up on my challenge — if no one else has, that is.

Is there a difference between an art in which the point is hard/soft (as with your leaves) and one in which the nature of the edges becomes simply a subtle part of the whole, without being its focus?

I hadn’t looked at Estes for a while, although I’ve always loved his reflections. It’s hard to tell from reproductions, but when I look closely I see Estes playing tricks with the edges of the edges, just as Carlson suggests.

Have a grand time with the thistles– what a great place to begin your painterly processes. I’m ambivalent about details — I’d like to be more cavalier about them, but often find myself grinding them out, particularly with the representative work. And I end up feeling like they are the result of grinding of teeth, perhaps.

But I’m working on that lively paint theory along with big shapes — these in some abstract work I’ve been doing — and playing with the edges as well. I just sat with the art of Lucinda Parker, a local artist who has a big exhibit down at the art school. I could sit at a table in the deserted commons and really look at what she does. It’s impressive and may have given me some impetus in my own abstracts.
http://www.laurarusso.com/artists/parker_l.html

You and Auspicious Dragon are definitely right when you think of photos as having the kind of detail that contemporary painters tend to eschew. It’s the one irritating thing I find in books about doing contemporary representative work, particularly plein air. There’s a veritable adoration of the tossed-off look, which can mean lots of paint and color but not detail.

For 4 days, I had my first lessons in oil painting with Karl. As my first motif, I selected the second pitcher thistle image in http://artandperception.com/2008/07/family.html.

My mindset was to paint lots of detail with sharp edges, inspired by Auspicious Dragon once stating his preference for photographs over painting because of their richer detail; my love for Richard Estes’ cityscapes with their edges (my memory from 2 decades ago when I studied them); and finally, my day job where detail is everything.

Next week, I will post my first try, looking forward to critiquing. In the meantime, flying back to the US, I will muse about your post. Welcome back!

Welcome back. A&P now feels more complete. This is a major post and I too must chew on it some. In the meanwhile let me say that it’s good to have you among us again.

I only recently began to think about edges explicitly. Among other things, I realized I really liked contrasting hard and soft edges, which is something I’m experimenting with in leaf pictures and elsewhere. You’ve given me lots to think about, but it’s already tomorrow, so I’m going to sleep now.