is part of the process of completing and archiving my paintings. I name all of my finished paintings and write the name on the back of the painting along with the year it was painted, and I usually sign and put the year on the front too. I also name the photo file I keep of each painting and use the name in the description when I share it on social media. It might seem trivial and unnecessary, but it’s actually quite useful when, after a time, that work comes up in conversation, or you need to find the photo of it for some reason.

I don’t name my studies or work in my sketchbooks though, but I do date them and occasionally sign them or initial them.

An example of why naming is useful is - I have an album of paintings on FB that started in 2012 and finished in 2018. There’s about…well without counting them, 80 paintings? 12 of them are magpie paintings and they are all different. Because I paint commissions people who are interested in commissioning a work might ask for a painting “like that magpie with the colourful background” and here I wouldn’t know which one it was because so many of them have colourful backgrounds, and this is when names can really help with communication.

below are some of my Magpie paintings from that album and their names:

Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking….

Ok, enough of 2013, fast forward a few years…now I’m enjoying looking through my older work and remembering the names and trying to remember why I named them as I did…is there some secret message that one can’t say out loud because…well…

there’s always room for a bit of humour no matter how mad things might get (big laugh emoji).

I’m enjoying seeing the evolution of my magpie paintings, if I do say so myself. I’m noticing that they are getting more refined and realistic, and are telling more of a visual story where originally they started off as quite abstract.

There’s more but you get the idea…

Looking back through there’s some funny names that kind of change the way you think about the work. I’m pretty sure that that was my intention, but knowing myself there’s some random coincidences going on too.

Names can add an extra layer of meaning:

I’m pretty sure I named this Middle Pig so you’d think about the middle pig first where maybe she’s the one that you’d not notice until last - or at least she’s the one that think’s she’s overlooked because…you know… “middle syndrome”…she has to concentrate the most too because she’s not only balancing on the back of the biggest pig, but she’s supporting the little pig who is not only the smallest pig and the most glamorous, but has the longest distance to fall and so could hurt herself the most, especially if she get’s stepped on in all the kerfuffle, so all the responsibility for success rests on the middle pig’s back but the little pig get’s all the accolades for being so brave and agile, cute and a risk taker. and the big pig for being so strong and steadfast.

in “sheep.net” I wanted to draw attention to the time - here it could be a homestead from the early 1900s, I remember it was somewhere on Yorke Peninsular, maybe around Eidthberg? A homestead that retained it’s original character but with the addition of the satellite for the internet you know it’s a current event - not much has changed externally except for that and so the colourful expression of my painting is like a time warp superposition between the old and the very new.

And that brings me to why I wanted to talk about naming paintings.

My most recentently commissioned painting was modeled off of a painting series I did in 2014, and often what I do when I name paintings that are fashioned from one’s I’ve already painted is I make a small tweak to the name. Like when I did with a small collection of emu portraits, starting with “the one minute mile”, and I tweaked that name with each painting. “The 2 minute mile.” “The 1.5 minute mile” etc.

So now I need to think of a suitable name for my latest commission.

The painting from which the idea sprung is the above and below paintings from 2014:

Here it is on the wall. I like to hang my finished paintings up on the wall to test the hanging mechanism I’ve installed and to check the sides, and how they look in a casual setting, and to look for any mistakes in the painting before I hand them over.