Change of Heart

Acrylic on Canvas, 48" x 24"
Status: Sold

Commission piece. I don't get too many requests for abstracts but this one was done to add some color to a large Yaletown condo, so technically more of an interior decorating assignment.

Abstracts are always experimental for me: I hardly ever have a picture in my head of how it should end up, I just play around until it looks right. For this one, the hardest part was coming up with a title afterwards. Usually the title emerges along the way, but this one didn't, and knowing the customer meant I didn't want anything too girly or too pretentious or too negative. So I hit the online thesaurus and went down the internet wormhole to come up with a list of potential titles, (plus several others that are too embarrassing to list here):

Numerical: Schematic #6, Red #1.
Factual: Bloom, Caldera, Crash, Lava, Embers
Abstract: Empathy, Fever of Unknown Origin, Tantrum, Recoil, Mob Rule.
Mysterious: Narakas, Raurava, Sañjiva, Damyata*
Sentimental: The Awful Daring of a Moment's Surrender*, These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins*, Shantih* (*cf: =TS Eliot's The Waste Land, one of my favoritest poems ever. Eh, I know, it was getting late, I was reaching).

I rejected all of the above for various reasons (e.g.: too girly, too pretentious, too negative) and solicited input from my immediate audience, who supplied the following:

Son (age 6): A Forest and Some Added Red. Or Blood for Murder. Or Painted Red Rocks.

Husband (age 40): (suggested several titles, mostly to do with volcanoes) and then eventually came up with Change of Heart, which is what I settled on. It's not too pithy, not too pretentious, general enough, obscure enough, short enough, and let's move on already.

Phew. That's a rather long, troublesome explanation for a painting title. But there you have it.