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Painting Titles
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Posted
I have seen paintings which depict a patch of long grass ,a tree and some sky and titled something like " Near Ullswater".This is to satisfy all the people who want to know the landscapes location before they consider buying it. Why do artists use such titles for something which can be anywhere? in the past, when people asked about a painting from my imagination"Where is it" I used to ask them where they thought it was. Anything they said I confirmed and they were happy and the sale accomplished. They liked the picture and they knew where it was.if anyone asked.and who could argue about a bit of countryside which could be found replicated all over the country. Discuss.....Syd
Posted
If they are paintings on the online gallery, maybe people don't have any intention of selling and they are just titled for the gallery purpose. I don't produce much art at all, and when I do it is mainly for my own purposes, so I never even consider titles until I'm asked for one in the gallery.
If you've seen the paintings for sale somewhere then I'm not sure. Maybe the painter thinks that by identifying the location it will appeal to people who are from "near Ullswater", rather than letting the viewer guess.
Michelle
Posted
Clever Syd . Grass , tree ....bit of sky ,punters own suggestion...sale.
Though certainly if it is a specific place people are often more likely to buy . I suppose the anonymous grass/tree "Near Ullswater" is a clever bit of marketing though it's never worked for me , living in a fairly touristy area I notice that local artists do paint the local scene and are more likely to sell them when recognisable as somewhere the buyer knows.
I suppose there is no point taking commissions for painting a portrait if it's not recognisable to the sitter.
Posted
While I've never understood why people want to know where a particular painting was taken from - what does it MATTER? - the fact is they so often do. I've done the Syd trick in my time, I confess - it usually works....
But then, if you do identify a place, there are those who will immediately jump up on their little toes and squeal "Sir! Sir! I've found a mistake! That tree isn't there at all, it's from somewhere else!": and then they get quite surprised when I very gently turn them around and boot them right up their silly backsides....
I am hardly ever going to paint a scene exactly as it is - I will usually adapt it, take what I want from it: I'm trying to paint something, not produce a child's atlas... Even so, if you say a painting is of Carisbrooke Castle (on the Isle of Wight - come and see it!) it's not a lot of good changing it or its environs into something no one who knew it would recognize.
But this is why I like Alan Bickley's oil paintings - they tell us about the places he paints, they don't show us every tile on the local church roof, they interpret place: and I much prefer paintings like that to topographical exactitude even if that might be what some want.
The answer to Syd's question though, from a purely commercial point of view, is that you stand a lot better chance of selling a painting if you give it a title and if that title represents an actual place.
I just think you can be a bit more approximate in the painting than you are in the title, and with any luck no buyer or critic will go out looking for the exact spot you must have been standing on at the time. Try that with Turner, for example, and see how far you get....
Posted
Well I've told this story before but it's probably worth repeating although I may have got the counties in the wrong order - my memory fails me. I did a countryside painting a few years ago which I exhibited in Leicestershire under the title Leicestershire Fields. It didn't sell so it was exhibited in Nottingham under the title Nottinghamshire Fields - again it didn't sell. I then exhibited in an exhibition in Northamptonshire and- yes you've guessed it - it sold.
Posted
+1 for titles. I get the "Artfinder" Twitter feed, and there's a picture today called "Nude 268" by an artist called "Ga Ga". The danger is, if you don't title your paintings you end up with "Landscape 492" and all that sort of thing. Ga Ga's nudes are heading in that general direction.
A musical simile - John Williams, in the program notes to his first album on his own label, said that track titles were there to avoid calling them "Song 1", "Song 2" and so on; so it's not just a painterly problem.
Posted
I believe that we covered this topic a short while ago but it is an interesting subject nonetheless, and is important.
If you intend to sell your work in a gallery in my experience a generic title such as say 'Winter Landscape' will receive less interest than if it is slightly embellished to read something like 'Winter Across The Trent Valley'. It may not be a view across the Trent Valley but it works for me and I have never had any comeback. Generally mind you I do tend to paint plein-air whenever possible so it will of course be a 'reasonably accurate' representation of the subject, but certainly bearing my usual 'artistic interpretation' of the scene, otherwise I would just simply take a photograph, a subject already heavily discussed on the forum.
I'm never keen on a short title followed by a number, looking back to our Belgian friend I note that much of his work is numbered accordingly ie. Wood 711081. but perhaps that is for his own reference but as a viewer I would find it more interesting to know where it was painted, or perhaps a wood is a wood wherever it is...
Edited
by alanbickley
Posted
Like many I paint sketches plein air and work up landscapes in the studio, where they develop and change from the sketches and become scenes from Seago's 'nowhereland'. Part of the fun of painting is the ability to put in or leave out what suits the painter. I have recently completed a coastal landscape and the few that have so far seen it have all asked 'Is it Flamborough?'. The answer is no it's not because you will never find that precise view of the coast north of Flamborough Head, but it is reminiscent of it!