The question of titles

 

Pages from my 2013 studio journal

The question of titles for my work comes up every now and then and I thought that I’d address it here as best I can. Anyone who has heard me talk about this in the past knows that titles are tricky for me. They are usually the last thing that I’m thinking about in the process of making art. It’s very rare that I’ll go into the painting process with a title already in mind. I do like to give my works titles of some sort, sometimes just for identification purposes. In a pinch, the very least I’ll do is something like, “Untitled (green 1)” or assign a number that is usually some configuration of the date the piece was completed. I usually do this with works on paper. 

Titling a work can be tricky, but the first thing I like to do is think about the piece and how it feels to me once it’s done. Does anything jump out at me formally? Is there some visual connection to a place or scenario that I know or have experienced? I might be working on a series and make some variation on the main series title. There’s never usually any one thing that influences a title. When making work, I’m always listening to music, podcasts or there’s just silence. Various things that I might be thinking about, emotional state of mind, how I’m feeling physically can also have a hand in it. “What were you thinking about when you made this?” Is never that simple. There's always a stew of many influences. Usually, my head is in the space of the painting that I'm working on. I'm trying to see how things are coming together or if they are not. 

To help in the titling process, I like to keep a running list of various ideas. Many times, as a starting point, I like to jot down a song lyric from something I’m listening to or maybe there’s a good sentence from something I’ve read that sounds good. I never copy things verbatim, I like to shuffle words and phrases around to come up with something that seems to work with a particular piece. I keep pages in my sketchbooks just for lists of potential titles. Some of my titles have a narrative feeling to them and often, I’ll make those up. It’s a combination of having overheard a snippet of a real conversation, making up a scenario of my own and coming up with something out of that. 

TM

Looking back: "Inverted Dislocation" brochure, 2004

(Above: Brochure for "Inverted Dislocation", with essay by Gerard Brown, 2004)

Recently, I've been going through old art-related papers, exhibition notices, writings, etc...and starting the task of organizing it all. It's been interesting to look back over some of this history, think about that time and how far I've come since. Above are photos of the exhibition brochure for my first solo show at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, back in 2004. The show was titled, "Inverted Dislocation" and featured works that were much more 'minimal' in appearance than anything that came after. 

I was interested in minimalism at the time, but not the idea that the human hand should not be present. That felt like a dead-end line of thinking for me. I was very much into the materiality of paint on surfaces and not hiding that a person made these works. The extreme side of minimalism, as practiced by Donald Judd and others, shunned any trace of the human hand in the making of art work. With my paintings, I wanted to bring the viewer in with strong form and color and hopefully keep their attention when they got up close and saw all of the shifts in color, surface quality and other materials that I may have used, like graphite. 

A few years prior to this work, in the mid to late 90's, I was making work that was much more grounded in a kind of mixed media painting that straddled the line between painting and sculpture. Those works were comprised of acrylic on wood panels, aluminum, plexiglas, hardware like screws and more. As I worked my way through that body of work, I felt the pull towards a more stripped down kind of painting that was influenced by the Irish-

American painter, Sean Scully and aspects of architecture in cityscapes. My thinking at the time focused on creating spaces that referenced man-made environments, but weren't about a specific place or time. 

Considering Scully's huge influence on my work then, I really struggled with making these paintings, but felt compelled to do so. I wanted to make what I considered straight-forward, bold paintings that subverted viewers' expectations. The first thing people would see were the colors and patterns and maybe think about going past them, but hopefully, the work would be enticing enough for them to come closer to the painting for a better look and discover that there was more going on besides the first impression of pattern and perceived flatness. There's all manner of brushwork, variations in color and other marks that energized those paintings.

My reticence in showing these paintings was that I considered them to be too much like Sean Scully's work. Now, I knew that they didn't really look like his work, but I had been so nose-deep in studying his work that I felt that anyone would make that connection. Maybe they did, but the more I painted, the more that I realized that these were definitely *my* paintings and not knock-offs of Scully's pieces. Realizing that I didn't want those automatic comparisons, I did as much as I could to make my compositions as unique as I could within the parameters of form and color that I set for myself. Once I got past my fear of comparison, I dove into the work fully and feel that I managed to make a group of paintings that stand on their own.

TM

Rest & renewal (is good for art)

(detail of new painting 2.01.22)

Last Friday, I left the studio thinking that I was just about finished with a new painting; that I was just a few small moves away from stopping work on it. Of course, when I got back to the studio yesterday (Monday), I saw that this painting's journey was just beginning. This happens a lot and I'm always telling people that it's a great practice to let a work sit for a day or two, maybe a week, when you feel that it's done or if you're having problems with it and stepping away makes sense. I mostly work in the studio during the week, leaving Saturday and Sunday open to spend time with Julia. Things tend to work out well with this schedule. 

So, last Friday I stopped working on the painting. I felt that it was nearing completion and all I needed was a couple of big or little moves to bring it to its final state. There was some  leakage of paint from under the painter's tape on a section of the painting, resulting in some feathering of paint beyond the border that I didn't want to leave visible. I thought about what to do for a bit, but decided that it was best to just leave it alone for a while since I couldn't find some resolution then. The couple of days away from the work and studio did me good. Monday, I came to the studio with new mental energy and insight into what I thought needed to happen. Without thinking about it too much, I started to add some collage elements to the painting surface with the intention of adding brushwork and drawing on top of them. It was a really risky move, but well worth it in the end.

By the time I was done for the day, I was really happy about having taken the leap of faith with adding the collage elements. They completely changed the spatial dynamics within the image, making for a much more interesting composition than previously. Part of what I was after were different sets of marks than were there previously. The mix of opaque and transparent papers made a huge difference. Adding more marks on top of that pushed this painting to a place it would have never gotten to had I not let it (and myself) rest for a couple of days. 

TM