My wife has a “thing” about the titles of pictures. She insists that they are an integral part of what is offered to the viewer and not just an identification tag. Her greatest displeasure is reserved for artists who dare to exhibit a piece with the label Untitled. For this reason I have come to be very careful when it comes to giving titles to my own work.
There are occasions, however, when this can be vey difficult. Having painted and drawn Almscliff Crag more times than I can tell, for example, I do find that my imagination is stretched to its limit on occasions. Perhaps my difficulty in finding new titles is a kind of “memo to self” that I ought to move on to another subject.
At a more serious level, however, I do recognise that the right title can provide something positive to the experience of viewing a work. Conversely, the lack of a title can leave me as the artist asking myself why it was that I bothered to do the painting in the first instance. This week I have had an interesting experience that really brought home to me the positive way in which titles can work both for viewer and the painter.
I have had in mind for a little while a pair of possible compositions that would somehow complement each other as expressing contrasting moods. The first of these I finished the other day and I am really pleased with the result. Without going into a great deal of detail, it depicts a man and a magpie looking at each other in a woodland scene. Its intended “twin”, however, refused to come into focus for me. I knew that this one would be set among rocks, and also would also depict a man and a bird. Somehow or another it just refused to gel as an image.
Then as I drove over to Ilkley last night, to the weekly life-drawing class, suddenly and totally out of the blue a possible solution came to me. Into my head came the old folk rhyme about magpies: “One for sorrow, two for joy.” Indeed, the first picture does have a very melancholy atmosphere. If I introduced two magpies into the second picture, instead of the single hawk with which I had been toying, the link between the two images would be established. Indeed, I had anticipated that its atmosphere would be very different from its partner. Two for joy would provide a rationale for the entire exercise.
Of course, one can never be sure that a project will work out as anticipated. It could well be one of those ideas that are abandoned without every being shown–or even completed, and could sink without trace. Today, however, I managed to find time to throw myself into this new idea, sketching out the basis of the composition. Some important things still need to be resolved, especially the treatment of the central human figure, but the arrival of that simple phrase, providing titles for the two pieces, has imported a sense of direction and energy to my work. We’ll see how it goes.