Titles

I am reading The Claverings by Anthony Trollope. And a fine good read it is too, sex, money, class, families. Anyway, after a while I noticed the cover...

...which has nothing to do with the contents. The painting is by William Powell Frith and is called At The Opera. I'd noticed and not noticed the binoculars. Suddenly, knowing the title, I imagined the girl looking through them at the lit stage below her, viewing the heaving bosom of the fat heroine, and the heavy makeup around the eyes of the male lead.

The title of the painting had done that much.

And this coincides with a decision that I've made to no longer title my drawings and "art" works. (Not that I'm in the same league as Frith.) I have an idea that titles can destroy the effect of the image, suddenly it is "understood". The viewer can pass on to the next work.

But At The Opera had opened up my brain to what was beyond the painting, suggested by the painting and title. So no hard and fast rules I suppose.

I'm going to stick, for the time being, to non titles, just the dates (in the ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format) of when the each work is finished. This means I give even less to the viewer, less than the perfect triangle I'd thought I had in this post.

By the way. An aside. The critics/intellectuals/commentators who say (fashionably) that there is a "conversation" between the art work and the viewer are stupid or in bad faith. The artwork whispers, talks, shouts and maybe screams at the viewer. But the artwork never listens to the viewer, in no way is it a "conversation". And when they speak about artworks having a conversation with each other (as they do in exhibitions which put together two different artists), well...