With the painting, as a viewer who didn’t do the painting, having a clue or a caption is helpful to see what the artist saw. Particularly with something more abstract, more open to interpretation. Your wonderful yellow wall could represent something else to another set of eyes. And maybe that’s fine — as an artist, your subject will matter to you, whether it’s a representation of something real or a thought or feeling. But as an observer, I might see heat where the artist sees anger (not in that image, by the way) or clouds where the artist might see eggplant. And it really doesn’t matter, because unless it’s tagged, the vision becomes the viewer’s, not the artist’s. And is that OK? That’s up to the artist!

And I love what Linda mentioned about “Cats.” I love that particular piece a lot. (And we all know a cat or two with multiple names!)

When I finish a painting it can be difficult to decide upon name. Sometimes I make something up or pick a name that is seemingly random. Other times a name just pops up. Often it is not until much later that I realize the random name wasn’t so random or that the name that just “popped up” really didn’t.

Creative work is always a dialog between the conscious and subconscious and we all know more than we are consciously aware of–there is always an invisible hand guiding our work, or misguiding it.

The T.S. Eliot reference is on the mark. In fact painting is the effort to make the ineffable visible.

Your observation about naming a photograph as a way of “capturing a beginning” is an intriguing observation. Likewise, I believe that naming a photograph can also be about endings. Often the process leading up to the making of the photograph may go through many changes of intention, so much so that only after the photograph is made is the intention revealed to the photographer.

I’m glad Tony and Carmina are becoming real. I was unsure about using characters this way but felt it would give me flexibility in expressing different and even contradictory points of view. It also allows for humor and social commentary.

Just to scoot a little farther into left field, Carmina’s words remind me of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Naming of Cats”. I won’t quote, but I remember a bit – cats have everyday names, and fancy names, but in the end the name that matters is the name known only to the cat – it’s “ineffable” name, which it contemplates regularly.

It feels to me as though Carmina is saying it’s part of the artist’s task to discover a painting’s “ineffable” name – the name it already has laid claim to through the creative process. How you discover that, I have no clue.

What I do know is that in my writing, some titles come to me fully formed before I’ve written a word, and my job is to make sense of them. Other times, I haven’t a title at all until the piece is completed, and then the piece seems to name itself – the title becomes obvious.

You do realize Tony and Carmina are becoming so real I wish I could pop over to the Supreme Bean to chit-chat for a while!

I found one other delight here – Tony’s remark that, “If the viewer doesn’t know what they are looking at they won’t see it—they will only see shapes and forms but they won’t know if those shapes are the Eiffel tower or a beehive.” It’s art as Rorschach! Flat, one-dimensional, absolutely open to interpretation.

The first time I took the Rorschach, I told the test administrator the first image looked like a butterfly that had been run over with a lawn mower. (I didn’t have a clue how to interpret the look he gave me.) When I saw your photo “An Homage to Aaron Siskind”, there wasn’t a clue anywhere – no title! – and my mind darted this way and that, trying to figure out “what it was’. Like Jeanie, I finally settled on birch – trees, logs, whatever.

One aspect I didn’t address is when not to caption, and there are certainly times to avoid it.