Naming a Painting

Believe me, I’m no expert at this and would welcome other thoughts about how other artists name their paintings.

Here are some suggestions I’ve heard:

·        Go to a paint store and gather some of those paint chips; the various colors are named having great sounding titles that could be used for paintings.

·        One artist says he always place-named his landscape paintings until one client argued with him that he knew the place and it wasn’t the one the artist said it was.  So now, this artist avoids arguments and never uses the name of the place in the title.  Buyers like to imagine where places are anyway, why disappoint them (and possibly loose a sale) when they find out it wasn’t the scene they thought it was?

·        Another artist always used a 6 letter words to title all of her paintings.  She used names like “energy”, “beauty”, etc.  In fact she had developed huge lists of 6 letter words so it was not problem to scan that list for the perfect title.

Sometimes while I’m painting, a title pops into my mind early on.  Other times, it seems like such an afterthought to have to title a painting when I’ve spent so much time just painting it. I find myself cramming for a name the last minute.  It would be nice to have a system for this.