Do you date your paintings?

David's Kitchen Paintings - with dates!

Last week a got an email from a local frame shop. A buyer had dropped off 6 of my daily paintings of fruits and vegetables for framing and asked if I'd put dates on the paintings near my signature.

Of course! So I matched paint and put dates on 4 of them. 2 needed new varnish (lint!) so I scrubbed off the retouch varnish and then put dates on. One had a couple of funny yellow spots on the white background that weren't in the varnish layer so I painted over those and hope they don't return. I'll put a thin layer of Gamvar on all of them since they are finally, mostly, nearly done drying.

I'd recently had a conversation with the collector about dates because he owns a lot of amazing art and really enjoys seeing the dates on the paintings. It helps place them in context: of the time, of the artist's career and of the buyers life.

He had a point. A very good point. In museums I notice if a painting is dated and I use that date to track the development and see the evolution of style. Since our conversation I've been painting my signature - L McShane - AND the year.

But I'm curious: do you put dates on the front of your paintings?

Comments

Deborah Paris said…
Many galleries prefer that you don't date them on the front. It makes the work look "stale" if it has last year's date, they say. I don't date them on the front but I do put my inventory number on the back which includes the year and month the work was created.
July 22, 2010 at 4:53 PM
Lisa McShane said…
That's good to know and makes a lot of sense.
July 23, 2010 at 12:43 PM
Unknown said…
You know Lisa-I think dates are very important on the front of a painting because a good painting is like a fine wine ! It just gets better has time goes by. You remember certain things in that time in your life :)
July 24, 2010 at 10:59 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My favorite love poem - West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver

Image
for Dan on Valentine's Day West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and your heart's little intelligence, and listen to  me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a  dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks --- when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming---then row, row for your life toward it. Still Waters. ©2010. Lisa McShane.
Read more

My favorite art inventory system

Image
Over the past couple of years I've looked at and played with a lot of computer programs for keeping track of artwork. Here are past blog posts on the subject: Art Inventory Systems, here's what I've tried and then this Update on Art Inventory Systems Alyson Stanfield has also written about this riveting subject on her great blog here . I come to these systems with built-in bias. I prefer a FileMaker based system to an Access based system because I think it's a more powerful and smoother software to use. I'd worked for a nonprofit that used Filemaker and it's what I know. I also prefer a system without goofy graphics. I'm an artist. I care how things look. If I open up software every couple of days I would like it to be clean and simple and not ugly. But computers evolve and the next direction is to the cloud. That is a system where software doesn't live on your computer but you access it via the internet. I operate on 3 devices: my iMac in my ...
Read more

#artinthetimeofcorona

Image
Tenino: Flooded River; Dalles at Dusk , 2020, Oil on Linen, 24" x 60". Shown here with Andrew Vallee sculptures. Hey check out this great blog article from Metropolitan Frame! It's an interview of me and where things are at with my work, given the virus. Metropolitan Frame is a custom frame shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota that produces most of the frames I use these days, including the one above. Their work is flawless and fits my work well. Click here for the article, #artinthetimeofcorona
Read more