Titles

Thinking about how difficult it is to title my paintings. Usually I call most of them "Untitled" followed by the date of completion. Before a recent show I was faced with the absurdity of hanging six works differing greatly from each other but all with the same title. Giving them numbers didn't help. They weren't part of a series, or even a sequence of making.

Odilon Redon writes in "To Myself" that the title of a work "is not justified unless it is vague, indeterminate, and aspiring, even confusedly equivocal." I struggled to find words that would not define the work or determine its meaning yet would have "imaginative logic".

Poets do this. I asked poet Pam Brown to name the painting she and her husband had just bought. They decided its title was Uova. Here it is:

I feel that the painting became complete when it was named by Ones Who Really See It.
Who, as Redon says, are spectators whose minds are incited by "fictions of great or small significance."