How a Painting Gets Its Name

This is a small thing that matters more than it has any right to.

A title is the only words attached to a painting. It is the first thing somebody reads and the thing they will use when they talk about it to somebody else. And there is no rule for arriving at one.

Sometimes it comes first

Occasionally the title exists before the painting does. A phrase arrives, it will not leave, and eventually a piece turns up to go with it.

Those are the easy ones and they are rare. When it happens the whole painting is built toward the words, which is a lovely way to work and cannot be arranged on purpose.

Usually it comes last, and stubbornly

More often a piece is finished and sitting there with no name, and I am circling it with a notebook feeling faintly stupid.

The temptation at that stage is to describe what is in it. Woman at a horizon. Blue abstract with gold. Accurate, useless, and it closes the painting down rather than opening it.

What a good title actually does

It gives you a door in without telling you what to find on the other side.

Too vague and the viewer has nothing to hold. Too specific and you have handed them your interpretation and removed theirs. The right title sits between, and you know it when you find it because the painting suddenly seems more like itself.

A set that shows what I mean

The Below the Surface collection is named entirely in water language. Surface Tension. Refraction. The Shallows. Low Tide. Undertow. Holding On. The Plunge. Anchored.

Every one of those is a real physical thing that happens in water and also a thing that happens in a life. That is the whole trick of the set, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. None of them tell you what the painting is about. All of them point.

The ones I get wrong

I have renamed pieces. Not often, but it happens, usually when a title turns out to be doing too much work and people start telling me what the painting means using my own words back at me.

That is the tell. If everyone arrives at the same reading, the title was too loud.

And a confession

Some paintings have a name in the studio that is not the name they end up with. Working names, usually something dumb and practical, occasionally something a bit rude about how difficult the piece has been.

I am not going to tell you which ones. But if you own a piece of mine, there is a reasonable chance it spent several weeks being called something far less dignified before it got its actual name.

You can see how the titles work across a whole body in the Sands of Time collection, where the names carry the chapters.

Warmly,

Dani