What's in a name?

Black Bird. balanced found materials, dimensions variable.

So what is in a name? Shakespeare, odd that I should quote/misquote from him two blogs in a row, would have it that 'a rose by any by any other name would still smell as sweet'. Well that may be true, but Shakespeare didn't christen the rose, Rose, he just used it's sobriquet. I wonder how he would have faired if he had had to bestow the title in the the first place? Probably very well, but I'm sure that a huge amount of thought would have been involved in the christening process. Any parent knows how much thought and time is spent choosing baby names. A child would be incomplete without a name, no mother who has spent 9 months bearing a baby would ever consider leaving it unnamed  once it was born.

When an artist creates a piece of art, although it is not always recognised to be so, the majority of the art work is not the art 'object', rather it is the thought process which lead to its creation. Paintings, the best ones, are not simply about the image, that may be a part of it but it certainly isn't everything. The process, the thought, the concept behind every piece of art work is what makes it what it is. And that concept should be a complete thought not something taken part of the way and then carelessly abandoned when it is still unfinished. People who call themselves artists are forever pushing 'objects' into the world branded as 'untitled', small U.  An untitled object is a sign of an  incomplete thought, and is something which certainly does not constitute an artwork in any way, shape of form. 

The above piece is complete and named 'Black Bird'. Not Blackbird, I did consider this as a title but it didn't convey the thought behind the work. I also considered Vulture and indeed Black Vulture, the latter being the birds that I most often see wheeling in the sky here in West Virginia. I nearly went with Buzzard, mainly because of the fact that it is actually a misnomer often used here for Black Vultures and I appreciated the fact that it is used erroneously within this context.  All of these bird names are too specific for this piece, That may seem like a strange thing to say in an essay regarding the specificity of names bestowed on artworks, it does however make sense within the context of my concept. This sculpture isn't a specific bird or even bird species. It is about that high flying object in the distance. 'Is it a'... blackbird, is it a crow, a buzzard, a vulture or even an eagle. As you can tell I thought about the title of this piece for a long time.