Every piece of art should have a title. Why? Titles make business transactions easier, and they’re practical. When I first started painting I used long esoteric titles and for some reason I thought it was very artsy and sophisticated. I remember one painting vividly, it depicted caribou in the winter surrounded by a lovely snow covered landscape with mountains in the background. But more importantly to me, the caribou were from a certain heard in the Wrangells and were walking along a significant place near a little known road…. Duh? So I titled the painting “Nomadic Mentastans at Jack Creek” Right! Which was all well and good, but when the gallery displayed the painting they asked me to shorten the title because it wouldn’t fit on the small identifying card. Such an insult, I thought. Sometimes I’m a slow learner.
The next painting was subsequently titled; “Blackburn Through the Notch”, Blackburn for the mountain in the distance and the notch for a secret known only by local pilots that was an escape route for small aircraft through the mountains in the event of low clouds or flying VFR (visual flight regulations) in IFR (instrument flight regulations) conditions (illegal and dangerous). Something anyone who saw the painting would want to know. Right?
Several years later I changed my tune and the word “practical” became my mantra for titles. It all began when the image “Blackburn Through the Notch” went into print. This was a very small sized print in an edition of 950 and left little room for my signature, the numbering and the title. Try as I might, I couldn’t fit all of the information on the front of the image without defacing the artwork. So, as a practical matter, this print was re-titled for the edition as simply “Blackburn”.
Gail Niebrugge, painter of “Blackburn”
