("Cool as a Cucumber" eyeglass leash)
I decided to name the eyeglass leash I posted in my last entry, "Seltzer Down Your Pants" because of something my mom used to say: "a little song, a little dance, a little selzer down your pants." I'm not sure where she learned it, or exactly what it means, but it sounds like a bunch of silly fun to me and that's why I like it. I've never poured seltzer down my pants but it has been hot enough in Vermont this week that I'm considering it. I walked down to the town's slow-as-ketchup river, found a shady place to sit and stick my feet in and immediately fell asleep. Heaven! I dreampt there was a river next to our house last night. I think it might have been because my mom and I were talking about the Buddhist idea that the whole universe is inside our bodies. Mom commented that the whole universe is in her property. I have been longing for rivers in this heat but now I wonder if I am also longing to feel more part of a metaphoric river. More flow. More connected. It's a thought...
I love requests for blog entries, by the way. I forget sometimes that there are things I deal with regularly that seem mundane and routine to me but that they are actually things that all artists deal with and therefore are quite vital topics for discussion. One topic is titles (thanks Ash!).
I really like giving my work titles whether it's painting, sculpture or jewelry. It's like giving a person a name and that name gives them a personality and depth. My jewelry is easier to name because I can get away with being whimsical but not so serious. Not as much time, thought or problem solving goes into my jewelry because I have the luxury of not having to question everything; It has to be wearable, not too heavy, and formally interesting. I know not everyone likes my style, so I base ideas of attractiveness on my own taste and intuition. Some pieces are better than others.
Titles for paintings and sculptures are a different story. Some pieces have a couple titles. For example:
This piece was originally called "self portrait." I gave it that name because that's what it was in a literal sense. I looked at a photo of myself and painted from it for a while and then put the image away and just paid attention to what I had already painted while finishing it. "Self Portrait" was a totally unfitting name for a couple reasons. In the end, it didn't really look anything like me (except maybe my crazy hair) but more importantly it had become something on it's own and something much more specific that a vague "self". I happen to believe that we all have many selves. Which one of my selves is this? Once I started to look at what the painting was doing on its own, despite where I started, I realized that the paint looked really toxic and the eyes looked kind of empty or dead. It was still some sort of self, part of me, but what self was it? A toxic self. Then Michael Jackson died. I never realized that he had so many issues with his skin-- ok Duh! He wanted to be white. What I didn't realize is how much he covered himself and his children up. It was like he wanted to hide his skin or to be skinless, like his skin was toxic to him and he didn't want to be in it. My gesture in this image started to remind me of Michael covering up his face and my dead eyes made me think about how thin and sick he was when he died (or parhaps how skin might look if someone wasn't inside it. I decided this was a sort of dream self-- a toxic dream self that had no skin or dreamed of having no skin. Or maybe it was my skin after I left it. It isn't important for anyone to know that my ideas of skin come from thinking of Michael Jackson. I just like the parellel metaphores.
This one was originally untitled. The imagery is so recognizable that I was of course instantly drawn to a concrete title like. "Mikel, Tiny One, Orange Crush and I." My eyes didn't get past the recognizable imagery at first to start to see what was happening in the painting beyond that. I don't like to give paintings concrete names because I think it can be too didactic, at least for my work. The viewer is already being slammed over the head with two cats and two people. You don't need to read a title that tells them the same thing. If I wanted you to see Mikel and I with our cats I would just hang up a photo.
This is when I noticed that it looks like Crush has a tiny flower pot on his head with a long stem growing out of it like a silly, pompus hat. Tiny looks like he has tiny lips with lipstick and a grand feathery necklace. I don't know what's up with Mikel and I but we all look like we're in some sort of bliss-land where our molecules are merging together in some sort of hilarious fruit-salad-like-fiesta. Basically I realized how ridiculous we look and the fun we look like we are having (except maybe the cats?) so I ended up naming it "Sassy Pants and the Good Times Brigade" as if we are some sort of troup out to being good times to all and mix them in with our trippy fruit salad-like life. Sassy Pants is Orange Crush because of his pompus hat. He really is quite sassy in real life. Maybe it's not the most amazing painting I've ever made nor the best title, but the tile does give it a different layer of meaning on top of the visuals.
That's my basic goal in titles: to give another related layer of meaning. Words are a medium just like paint is and I like to use titles as part of the piece rather than something that just tell you what it is. Sometimes I just sit and look at a painting and say, "Ok, what is it doing? Is there a verb that goes with it? Does it remind me of something? If this were a moment in a narrative what would the narrative be saying?"
Not all of my titles are stellar, but I tend to be more connected to the paintings that have more interesting titles. I wonder what other people think about when they title art?
Happy Monday!
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