Artists Notes : On Naming a Painting | Melissa Becker

One of reasons I have grown fonder of the process of naming paintings is because it usually takes place post-production, it affords me another way of thinking about what I have done.  

Many of the works I do originate as collages. Their content is rather mysterious to me as they emerge from the unconscious in a seemingly random way. I often select for painting those that I don’t understand and as I work on them a narrative or associative process develops.  This is a parallel activity, which is closer to a literary exploration or dream analysis.  All sorts of ideas and thoughts, not conscious while I paint, parade themselves as purveyors of meaning.  While I don’t dismiss them as irrelevant I can’t help feeling that I am an outsider myself and that the reason that one can only approximate meaning through naming is at the heart of the image itself.  If we could say it in words we wouldn’t need pictures. 

I expect I am biased towards the visual in this chicken and egg situation.  Yet it is evident that when one finds the right words they do indeed create an image. So what of the word ‘image’ itself? It has its etymological root  imagen (11c Latin) meaning an artificial representation in the stem  imitari -  to copy or imitate. But most of our associations with the word imagination, I suspect run rather along the lines of flights of fancy rather than something as mundane as a copy. How do we square this apparent contradiction?  

Images are things that are made – of clay, of paint, of words. They have been centre stage in all cultures throughout time because they represent complexities that are hard to fathom but deeply felt. Their power belongs to the associative logic of humanity accumulated over millennia of human experience. We used to project this knowledge onto the sky, now we tend to find it in the depths of our own sea-like natures.   For those outside the process it may seem like a flight of fancy but on the inside one feels like Alice in Wonderland – just telling it like it is in a very strange world. 

1. BEHIND THE BLUE CURTAIN

Japan has over 28,000 ‘onsens’ or hot spring baths. It is a daily habit for many Japanese to bathe communally after work. Before the Americans arrived in 1860 communal bathing was not segregated. As many onsens have unequally sized sections they swap their quarters daily indicating the male side with a blue curtain and the female side with a red curtain. One day I forgot this and walked into the side I had been in the day before. I didn’t get very far before I realised my mistake. This forgotten incident must have sparked this work, which became a meditation on the atmosphere of the bath house. Perhaps it could have been called ‘The Heaviness of Water’. 

2. AXIS

I’ve created a number of parallel narratives and names for this strange image. Each one gets a shaking down by the next. So now I’m back to being silent unless you really want to sit down and talk about it. One thing is common to all my interpretations though: the hands in the middle of the painting form an axis or fulcrum. I think the image is inherently unstable because of its structure so perhaps it’s always going to be an enigma.

3. POINT OF DEPARTURE

I have long loved this type of simple boat. It’s impossible to separate the various elements of form and function, symbolism and aesthetics when it comes to thinking about why I like them so much. So I went off on my own moody trip. 

4. MOUNTAIN MIRAGE

I’d like this work to be able to revolve so that it can be viewed with either mountain upright. Look at the reversed image for a while and then back at the first way up. Something strange can happen to one’s perception of the water and top of the mountain. 

5. NET WORTH

You can’t get around a narrative with this one but your interpretation may be different to mine. Mine starts with an anxiety about what is happening to fish stocks.

6. UNTITLED - SO FAR

Or should that be ‘Unentitled So Far’?

7. YOUR OWN TRUMPET

Some kind of trumpet or gramophone is the central image. It is surrounded by plummy reds, purples, pinks and greys that give it a perfumed lusciousness. When I showed it to art historian, artist and friend Anthea Callen,  I thought I had just started it. However, when we looked at it together, it was clear that I had just finished it. Painting is confusing sometimes. It can be over before it’s started. As stretching a canvas can take a long time this can be frustrating as one feels cheated. But as Anthea pointed out ’ that painting took 35 years of practice’ and one should celebrate moments of confidence and control. Hence the title from ‘Blowing/to blow your own trumpet.’

8. FOREST HIEROGLYPH

This has two bees (from a food label) set in a forest-like space, offset by a boy lying near the water’s edge. The painting has a languid dreamy quality. The word ‘Hieroglyph’ came to me because I feel I should be able to articulate the association between the boy and the bees but when I try it evades me like a forgotten language.

Another friend, Robert Nixon, who is Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA sent me an e-mail with the following comment.  

“I’m drawn most powerfully to Forest Hieroglyph: there’s something about the sweet industry of the bees, the prostrate boy’s curiosity, the sheer fecundity of the colors and the life forces flowing through each other. It feels very ecological, very regenerative. It has the feeling, through the contrasts in scale, of a very powerful, sustaining dream”.

9. TRAVELLER

This is from the first collage I did after a trip to Japan in September/October 2010. There is some jostling between form and image shown through the horses reconfigured or dismembered and flying every which way around a brown central form, a ploughed field.

I was still in the phase (usually spent trying to get back into the old groove) where one’s head is full of images and feelings about where you’ve been. You see familiar things in a new way.

10. GLOBE TROTTER

The little bit of map in the cut out space in front of the door is the narrow sea space between Africa and Saudi Arabia. Something I didn’t notice until I began to paint from the collage. A friend, Adele Hall, named this painting after we talked about it.

11. ‘DER BUT’ – HOMAGE TO GUNTER GRASS FOR ‘THE FLOUNDER’

If I don’t finish painting the fish part of a fish painting in one sitting, then I have to buy another fish to finish the job. But when I buy the next fish, even if it’s exactly the same kind and size and put it in the same place, it looks quite different to me. So I end up making a composite where I use the basic structure, which of course is the same, and re-do the details. The fish in Grass’s novel is from a fairy tale but he has a real personality. He promises to advise a Neolithic man on how to free himself from the Matriarchy if he is released from the hook. One of the funniest books I’ve ever come across. 

12. YIN YANG PLUM

A cherished memento - my parent’s blotter from Knysna, South Africa, somehow ended up with the plums and cloth. Perhaps a meditation on the uniting of opposites: male and female, complementary colours and forms, sweet and sour tastes.

13. FIG LOOP 

After painting this I saw that the strong colour and shape of the ribbon unite two almost separate still life compositions at the top and bottom of the painting.

14. ROCK POOL

In Japan I loved the way that all sorts of dead and dried out old things would be arranged in shop and house windows to create a little scene or to show their intrinsic qualities by comparison.  It made me feel like less of an oddball. For me a piece of draped cloth next to a sponge, a shell and a paper fish can’t simply be ‘a piece of cloth’ any more.

15. TASTE AND DESIRE

The Rococo painter Watteau loved stripes. There is something about stripes that makes for a sense of yearning. You can feel this elusiveness when you paint them as the sculptural form of the cloth is at odds with the surface pattern of stripes and you need to do a lot of tinkering to get the balance right.

16. SEA

A series of objects on a plain red background. This is the reworking of a painting I did in 1993. If I knew exactly why it was red I’d probably not have repainted it. 

17. COPPER

The copper plate in the background is for etching. My still life settings aren’t logical or sedate. They reflect a real-life domestic disarray. I find this a bit abrasive but productive as unexpected juxtapositions are discovered.

18. THE LINE 

I painted this before visiting India. We had some amazing experiences on trains while in India at the beginning of the year.   

19. MACKEREL CATCH

When painting fish there is only one way to do it: very fast. Painting thinly in oils on primed linen is a bit like painting on unsized Chinese paper.  Speed and rhythm become critical elements to the integrity of the image.   

20. PLUM BLOOM

This painting was the first in a series of plum paintings exploring the dark blue/purple and orange/ yellow complement.  Using these complements as a set of base colours I have added another set - pink/green.

21. ‘ASILE’ (REFUGE)

I like this word because of its sound and it’s the root for the English word ‘asylum.’ 

22. JAPANESE CLOTH WITH PLUMS

A friend and ex-student, 9 years old Tim Rock, wondered why I chose the blue background because it seemed to him like the sort of colour a child would use. I like to contrast warm and cool colours.

23. THE JAPANESE CLOTH

As I painted this after all that has happened in Japan of late I don’t feel I can make any comment that would not be incidental and reflect my feelings of sadness.

24. SCALES

I discovered that sardines shed their scales when stressed. The scales catch the light and are a challenge to paint. The little green squares of the background seem to be becoming a bit scaly.

25. SOURCE

The background went from red to blue to red again. 

26. GREEN PEACH

Green Peace doesn’t recommend eating garfish and this is not a green apple. 

27. OISHIDESNE? (DELICIOUS ISN’T IT?)

One of the first things you learn to say in Japan. It sounds better in Japanese.

28. PLAT DU JOUR

Sardines and mackerel are apparently still sustainable fish stocks.

29. UNTITLED

And no explanation.

Melissa Becker

May 2011