What shall we call it?

I recently created this painting of a bat (left).  I was using my usual strategy for creating such works, which is to use the paint left over from another piece (in this case a commission of a large dog which, unfortunately the commissioner has asked me not to show).

Most of the time, I paint these Left Over Paintings using thick slashes of paint with a palette knife.  This time I wanted to do something slightly different: I wanted something more contiguous, more of a whole piece, although I still used a palette knife. I started with the green circle in the centre. From this evolved the wings and eventually the piece as a whole.

This is the part where you come in.  You can choose the title of the painting, with or without a name for the bat.  Leave your suggestions below by the form on the Contact page or tweet me @williamjmackenzie.  I will pick my favourite and the winner will get a special mention.

All of this got me thinking about the naming of paintings. Previously I always thought that artists who didn’t name their pictures were just being lazy.  Now I think differently.  Naming a picture influences your perspective of the piece and you cannot help but perceive it differently.  So for example I named the picture left “The Pinta”, consciously borrowing the associations that name has with Columbus and exploration.    I could have called it something different, for example “Model boat on a duck pond”, and both mine and other people’s reactions to the piece would be quite different.

The name of a piece also places it in an artistic genre.  Prior to the 20th century most paintings were simply named after what they were depicting, Venus and Cupid for example, or had no name at all, either because everyone was supposed to know what was being depicted, or because the name was lost.  Even then they have acquired names, like the Mona Lisa.  Would we think of that painting differently if it was called “Unknown Lady from Fritton?” I suspect so.

So then if you are confronted with a painting called for example “The Moon Woman” then you know you are likely to be looking at a modern (or even Modern) work.  The Moon Woman incidentally is by Pollock, who rumbled this issue and switched to using numbers.  But even using numbers, or such names as “Untitled” or “Untitled 4”, comes with its own bundle of preconceptions.  You know you are looking again at a modern work and probably an abstract one. In many people just that name will initiate eye-rolling. I imagine when people first started using it, it didn’t have this issue but now it does.

I like using humour in my titles, so for example “A view from my window” is of course no such thing and you know this instantly, but it draws a different reaction from calling it “Mad plant in Africa”. I have developed two solutions to this issue: 1) look at the work before the name and 2) don’t worry about it; the name (or lack thereof) is just as much a part of the work as anything else.  So by entering this competition you can influence in quite a significant way what this painting actually is.