Giving a title to an artwork always is a special delight for me. The best titles are the ones that are like the last brushstroke on the drawing, that finish it and complete it. I like titles that are so strong that once it is given, the image would feel naked without it, not the same. I like it when they add an extra narrative layer to it, when title and image become an intertwined unity: When they become one.
Some titles come to me while drawing, some come before drawing, some come never at all (I don’t feel like all artworks need a title) and some never fit the artwork.
And sometimes, I love the title more than the artwork. Sometimes I even feel the urge to create an image for an evocative word or phrase that I can’t get out of my head and that wants to be expressed as an image.
Sometimes I read something somewhere and carry it around with me and at some point, I must make an artwork for it, like for “The Golden Road to Samarkand”, which is the title of a poem by James Elroy) or “The disobedient children of Lahore”, an image that rose while reading a small ad in a Lahori newspaper by a Pakistani father disowning his children for being disobedient, or “Blühn and Verwehn”* a line from a saying that children keep telling to each other in one of my favorite fairy tales, Andersen’s Snow Queen, a saying which they only understand at the end of the fairy tale, when they are adults and which also myself didn’t understand as a child but despite that, or actually because of that, fascinated me and stuck in my head until I was an adult and like the characters of the fairy tale, understood what the words meant.
There is something so satisfying about finally being able to write these beloved words under an image I feel there could belong. For me, words and images are not from two different worlds, they can’t be, because my words always long for images and my images always long for words.
This image is a miniature aquatint etching and it is called “Aisha and her horse are not on speaking terms”. In this case, the title came after or during the image, and this is definitely one of my favourite titles – the artwork would not be the same with it.
The irony of it all is that the title does not even fit onto the artwork because it is so small, so it just says “Aisha” (but I write it on the back). It was the first, but not the last time I drew someone sitting backwards on an animal, the image just came to me like later its title.
Aisha and her horse are not on speaking terms is available in my shop in three hand-colored versions.
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*Rosen, sie blühn und verwehn, wir werden das Christkindlein sehn (Roses, they bloom and they wither, one day we will see baby Jesus).
