Name My First Painting

The dead­line for name sub­mis­sions is over, and the con­test is closed. I’ll announce the win­ner over the week­end. A big thank you to every­one who par­tic­i­pat­ed!

My first painting

This is the first paint­ing I’ve ever made. I’ll suf­fix that with “in my adult life”, because I prob­a­bly did some­thing with my hands when I was a kid.

Julie, who’s very famil­iar with the medi­um, got me to sit down and paint with her. I was able to play around with dif­fer­ent tech­niques of strokes and the like. It was inter­est­ing to dis­cov­er the way the colours bleed, the con­sis­ten­cy of the paint, and the tex­ture of the can­vas.

It’s def­i­nite­ly abstract. I agree with Dan’s astrol­o­gy read­ing, in which he said that I see colours dif­fer­ent­ly, but that does­n’t mean I can cre­ate them. Frédéric once told me that it’s eas­i­er for him to paint than pho­to­graph, because if he needs a cer­tain colour, he can just add it to the paint­ing by hand, where­as you can’t do this with a scene in pho­tog­ra­phy. My forté seems to be in cap­tur­ing instead.

Painting does­n’t come nat­u­ral­ly to me. In ele­men­tary and high school, I went direc­tion of music (gui­tar, voice, flute, and piano) instead of visu­al art. In uni­ver­si­ty, when I was­n’t play­ing in bands any­more, I stuck with the writ­ten word, and even­tu­al­ly moved to pho­tog­ra­phy and video when that was­n’t enough.

So the paint­ing cur­rent­ly remains unti­tled. Partially because I can’t put a name to it, and par­tial­ly because I haven’t decid­ed what it is. Which seems a lit­tle sil­ly to me, as my need to cre­ate has always come from the need to express. Even though Jackson Pollock once said, “When I am in my paint­ing, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”, his paint­ings still had a direc­tion, a life of their own, much like an impro­vised jazz solo.

What do you see, and what would you name it?

Leave your sug­ges­tions in the com­ments, and I’ll choose a win­ner next Friday. The win­ner will win the paint­ing! Yes, I’ll even ship it to you. The dimen­sions are rough­ly 8.5″×11″ (or 21.6cm×28cm).

33 comments

  1. Happiness in the dark”

    I think daisies are hap­py flow­ers, don’t you think so?

  2. Beauty in Black and White

    My eyes only seem to want to focus on the red and yel­low swirls of col­or.

  3. I pre­fer straight­for­ward titles, so I would go with some­thing like “Daisies” or “Headlights”

  4. : ) As I was watch­ing you paint this, I kept see­ing shapes and colours that remind­ed me more of the solar sys­tem than any­thing else. The orange on black looked like bright suns or plan­ets. Considering I haven’t seen it since, look­ing at it again and read­ing some of the com­ments has steered me in all sorts of direc­tions, mak­ing it a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to name it. But, I think I’ve got it!

    When I first looked at it again, I saw the solar sys­tem as I remem­bered it. Then it became quite appar­ent that the shapes resem­bled some sort of flower or daisy but I was­n’t quite con­vinced until I noticed in the bot­tom left cor­ner, the shape of a bird. It looks like a small black spar­row curi­ous­ly appear­ing to steal a glance at the bright colours of the flower, hid­ing under a white petal to avoid being seen. But I saw you lit­tle bird!

    This gave it more of a ter­res­tri­al feel, but my ini­tial per­cep­tion was still wor­thy of atten­tion so I came up with this name:

    ” Celestial Blooms”

    Hope you like it :)

  5. Wild Daisies is 1st choice because I see a field of daisies.

    Truth in Light is 2nd choice because I see shield­ed plan­ets break­ing free of bar­ri­ers.

    • after a frus­trat­ing event, i came back to ur art­work and saw some­thing different…LIFE…I choose LIFE as my final title…good luck in choos­ing a win­ner! peaCe

      LIFE
      LIFE
      LIFE
      LIFE

  6. I would call it ‘We All Do’.

    Jeff, you real­ly mean to tell me you have nev­er paint­ed before? This is real­ly an inter­est­ing work with a lot of lev­els of front to back depth and some sub­tle bal­anc­ing going on with the shad­ing. If this is what you do on your first work, you had bet­ter try this more often. Impressed.

  7. A muse, a spark, a dozen(?) daisies of inspi­ra­tion

  8. Stephanie’s pick: Stellar Bloom

    It looks amaz­ing man. I had no idea you could paint!

    • Haha…after post­ing that we went back and read the rest and see Julie has some­thing real­ly sim­i­lar. We did­n’t copy, promise! ;)

  9. I saw this in the feed and “daisy Pop Rocks” imme­di­ate­ly came to mind if I were to give it a title — even before I got to the bot­tom of the post. So there’s my entry.

  10. i love it who­ev­er wins i willl py u for it lol in less i win with my amaze­ing title of ”silent hill daisies”

    come on thay soooo look like there right outa the game
    its amaze­ing jeff im soooo frig­gin jeal­ous you have more skill and tal­ent then most can even imag­ine
    it would look amaze­ing in my guest room soooooo.….
    i say action it lol

    silent hill daisies
    oooh yes the daisies of silent hill for the win

  11. oh and u must sign ur name in paint in the cor­ner like the true artist u are

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