Titles add meaning to our work, offering an entry point into what the work is about. Titles are names. And the names of things matter in all sorts of ways. Author Anne West notes that titles are hints. They have suggestive power and can hold secrets, as well as stimulate the imagination. Titles put objects into new contexts.
Often I receive questions about my titles, in particular why I use words in other languages. So, I thought I would share a little bit about my journey around titling.
Titling became more difficult once I made the transition From Representational to abstraction. I often described that shift as stumbling backwards down a mountain. It wasn’t something I was looking for.
When I first began painting my work was a mix of collage and acrylic paint, primarily landscapes, and often incorporated a word or fragment of a sentence. My titles were taken from the text I included in the work. A few examples are “I lay there in the grass” and “We are poems you and I.”
Titling became more difficult once I made the transition from representational to abstraction. I often describe that shift as stumbling backwards down a mountain. It wasn’t something I was looking for. Abstract work was frequently baffling to me and inaccessible.
And then I saw an assemblage by an artist in silver and black that moved me beyond my rational mind. I had no idea why. I didn’t understand the title. I didn’t understand the composition. I felt my usual frustration around not knowing and my tendency to dismiss what I didn’t immediately grasp. But something wouldn’t let go. I returned again and again to this piece transfixed. I tried to duplicate it in my studio using different materials, as if by doing so, I would understand it better. Finally I reached out to the artist, who graciously emailed with me and shared what her work as about.
Flotteur, 7” x 5”, encaustic and oil on panel. Flotteur is French for float.
From that point on, I was hooked. I didn’t want the meaning of my work to be spelled out and easily understood with the mind. I wanted it to be felt with the body, the way I felt that assemblage. The way it worked its magic inside me.
But now I had a new problem. What was my work about? And how did the meaning of this work relate to its titles?
A detail from Regn, 24” x 32”, encaustic, oil, graphite, metallic foil, and 23 karat gold leaf on panel. Regn is Icelandic for rain.
As I continued to explore mark making and my painting evolved, I did a lot of proprioceptive writing, unpacking my interests, delving into what I was curious about, into what stories were brewing inside me wanting to be told. Slowly I brought those stories to life. I found that they were more about moments, about transitory and fleeting experiences, less fully formed or easily articulated with words. They were still poetic and narrative in nature, but also a way for me to share all at a deeper level. They were about my desire to find stillness, my hunger for quiet, my struggle to work through anxiety. They were about loss and sadness, the way grief guts you, but also about the refuge and grace to be found in the natural world, about pattern and wildness and breath and secrets.
And for a while, I stayed with my old way of titling my work. I gave my paintings scraps or fragments of titles that pointed to the story behind the work. But now, those titles felt too deeply personal, too revealing. Working abstractly allowed me to move into a deeper connection with my work, a more intensely private space. My titles gave too much away. I needed to separate a little from the work. To step back and allow what I had created to become more universal, less specific.
Some realizations unfold over time slowly. This realization came sharp and sudden. I remember delivering a painting to a gallery and when I filled out the inventory form, I cringed as I wrote the title.
The first change I made was shorten my titles. The less words, the more open to interpretation a piece could be. And because I am a lover of language, and because I have had the privilege to travel, and maybe because I love listening to as much as watching foreign film, I began to collect words that had beautiful sounds and even design elements to them, like umlauts.
Sometimes a title comes from a trip, sometimes from something I hear on a podcast or read in a book. Occasionally I look up words that are relevant to the meaning of my work in other languages and then pick the one that sounds right. Simplifying my titles has helped me to step back, affording me that critical separation from my work as it leaves my studio and heads out into the world.
Licht, 12” x 12”, encaustic, oil, and 23 karat gold leaf on panel. Licht is German for light.
Working with other languages also adds a layer of mystery. So often we hear or see something and, thinking we understand it, dismiss it, clearing space in our brain to move onto the next thing. But when one sees a word they don’t know, they have to puzzle over it a bit. How do they pronounce that word? What are its various connotation? How are those ideas at play in the piece? It can also, as an interviewer recently shared with me, serve as a secret they are on in, if they already speak or are familiar with a given language.
There are no wrong or right ways to go about titling. Some people use humor. Some use fragments in the way I used to, but aren’t bothered by the sense of privacy I struggled with. One artist I follow numbers his work to relate to the date on which he made that particular piece. A simple exercise I’ve offered students around titles (and which I got from my friend Anne West’s book Mapping The Intelligence of Artistic Work) is to write down three possible titles for one of your works. Then explain simply and directly why you chose each of these three titles and how they affect the work’s meaning in different ways.