After Me (oil on canvas 2019)

Occasionally, I get asked about the titles of my paintings and what they mean. As a visual artist, I am primarily concerned with creating an experience for the viewer via visual means and I don’t want words to influence how the painting might be perceived or to tell the viewer what to see. However, I do need some way of identifying the paintings and differentialting them from one another. I know one artist who simply titles her paintings with consecutive numbers. If the last painting was “145”, then the next one is “146”. This seems like a logical way avoiding the problem of titles altogether, but it wouldn’t work for me. If someone said that they liked my painting called “223” I would have no way of knowing which painting they were talking about. The same problem would arise if I had hundreds of “untitled” paintings.

Years ago, my titles were essentially descriptive of the subject and/or the time of day or year that it was painted. If you scroll back far enough in this blog you’ll find paintings with titles like “Hay Bales at Dusk” or “Henderson Barn on a Cloudy Day”. But, in recent years, I have moved away from images that represent specific places or subjects and thus have had to find a more appropriate way of naming my paintings without spoonfeeding any content to the viewer.

My solution to this dilemma has been to keep a list of words and phrases that I like, picked up from books and poems, song lyrics, conversations, movies, etc., that could potentially be used as titles. I used to keep a hand written list taped to the wall in my studio but it recently migrated to my phone. (I’m slowly crawling into the digital age!) When I finish a painting I go to the list, pick something for a title, and then cross it off the list. Titles are constantly being added to and deleted from the list. The titles are intentionally ambiguous and rarely have anything to do with the content of the image (and if they do, it’s covert and allegorical and not something I would share with anyone) but are meant to be open to a wide range of interpretations by the viewer.

My daughter saw this painting and asked me what it was called. I told her it didn’t have a title yet, to which she responded. “Name it after me.”

As it turns out, that was one of the titles on my list (I’m not going to tell you where it comes from.), so it seemed only fitting to use it. I’ve always been one to embrace serendipity.