untitled

Big Afternoon, 2008. oil on panel 7 x 8




People often ask me how I come up with my titles for my work. And to be honest I sometimes wonder where the names come from because often the works seems to name themselves.

I have done, well, let's just say a lot of paintings and drawings of the San Joaquin Valley. I used to have titles like Flying Over the Valley, Flying Over the Valley II, Flying Over the Valley III, Flying Over the Valley VI. You get the point. I thought the names were just fine since its about the work, not the title. But when I first met my wife she told me that my titles were so boring that I couldn't help but improve them dramatically if I just used a little imagination. She encouraged me to use the working titles that I usually came up with when creating a piece. I had always felt that they were not serious enough to use as finished titles, and maybe gave too much away in terms of what I was thinking when I was making the painting. I soon realized it didn't really matter and it became fun to be more creative with my titles.


Titles sometimes come before I start a painting and the work is built around that title. Other times they come to me as I am working on a piece. If you came to my studio you would see titles graffitied all over the walls because they come to me at odd times. I never know where a good title will come from: the paper, a magazine, a book, a movie, the radio, or a conversation. I have learned to always have my ears open.


You would think that I would run out of titles for at some point, but I doubt it. As you can see I'm still "flying over the valley".

Recent Work

Around, 2007. oil on panel, 16 x 16

This is a painting that was the last in a series of four paintings that I did for The Vault. I am quite pleased with the sky since it was one that has been bumping around in my head for some time and could never make it work in my previous attempts. I couldn't figure out what color the blue had to be to make the yellowish/orangeish color work. It turned out that the blue wasn't really a true blue at all, but more of a green blue. Once that color relationship was established it then made putting the rest of the painting together much easier and it fell into place rapidly. It only took me four or five false starts to get to this painting, which is fairly typical for me when I am trying something new. That process goes like this: I see a color relationship outside and I think to myself, "Hmmm, that could make an interesting painting...I wonder what color I will have to use in order make a painting feel like this?" I go back to my studio and give it a go. At times I hit it right off the bat (but I can count those experiences on two hands)-others, like with this painting, I struggle to find the right colors that will work with what I have in mind. It's a funny process and not predicable at all.