Titling.
With work being photographed and sent off to various places, it brings about the importance of titling your work, I was thinking about it today and the current series of paintings, drawings and videos I mentioned in my last blog has now 4 working titles, and they are just working titles. They are in no particular order: “Isle of the Dead”, “Archipelago”, “Still Life” and “Ex-Piers”. I’m leaning towards “Isle of the Dead” for the paintings as the fact that it does reference Bocklin’s piece, but only slightly, I don’t think its too art-literate, just simply as an island of the dead, meaning a place that once was, but now is not; and to a certain extent that’s what they are, literally they are dead islands. The video piece however, that is another kettle of fish, it began simply as a method of documenting the time it took for me to draw these ‘islands’ and then use at a future date as reference material, but as with the way in art, things never really go according to plan, and it became a piece its it’s own right I believe. As a still life for the paintings it sits in an odd place as a moving image as reference material, but also not as encompassing as actually being there, but I quite enjoy the tension, it’s quite exciting.
I dislike leaving my work untitled; my practice is quite muddy so titles help string the stream of consciousness along, I think. While writing this, I think the titles have made themselves quite apparent, “Isle of the Dead” for the Paintings, “Still Life” for the Video. Cheers Degrees Unedited!
