Giving your paintings titles can be a daunting task, and something many artists struggle with. Some go the direct route and call a painting exactly what it is, like ’Down by the River’, or ’Roses’. Some try to get a little more creative with titles like ’Splendor in the Garden’. Some give up entirely and leave them ’Untitled’.

I find giving titles to my abstracts difficult sometimes, but it can also be a lot of fun. When I finish a painting, I look at it and try to see (or feel) what it says to me. Sometimes I think the painting has a certain feel about it and that’s what I use for the title, like ’Solitude’ or ’Serenity’. Sometimes what comes to mind is the simplest thing, like one of my recent paintings entitled ’Red’, which is almost completely red. If I could have thought of a better name, I would have used it, but I didn’t, so I called it red. It just seemed to fit.

But sometimes I have some fun with it. I have a painting that is basically a giant orange squiggle. People see different things in it. I see the highway of life, which goes this way and that, with a bright circle representing that which we always strive for but don’t always find, perhaps happiness, or love, or wealth. I called it ’To Be Or Not To Be’. I feel that it’s a very fitting title, and certainly an intriguing one at that.

I had some fun with a series of three paintings that I did a couple of years ago. I set off to do paintings that used only one colour, other than a few very small accents of black or gold. I called the first one ’Seeing Red’, then there was ’Feeling Blue’ and finally, ’Going Green’.

My latest painting has a title with a history. The painting gave me a lot of trouble, as sometimes happens. I painted it over several times, never being satisfied with the result. I finally took a different approach, collaged a lot of strange things to the surface and painted it with yellows and reds. (Creativity can take you to strange places sometimes.) Finally I liked it. Then I glued on some old wires, a phone wire, an audio/video wire and a cable wire, all with the connectors attached. They represented obsolete technology. I was going to call it ’Obsolescence’. Well, the wires started to come off after a couple of days and removing them made a terrible mess, lifting off paint and leaving glue residue all over the place. I fixed everything, repainted where necessary, and finally it was done. No more wires this time.

The title I came up with is a line from a movie, Galaxy Quest. It’s a spoof of Star Trek and sci-fi movies and very funny. Every time the ship is in trouble, the captain’s line is always the same ’Never Give Up, Never Surrender’. I thought that made a very fitting title for this painting in view of all the trouble I had, so that’s what I called it.

I guess it’s a title whose meaning is not immediately obvious, but it’s always amazing how viewers make up their own meaning. If not, they ask about it, and it’s a chance to open up a dialogue about the painting, which is also good. Certainly better than a boring old title.

Suzette

"Given an equal amount of intelligence, timidity will cause a thousand times more problems than audacity." (Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831)