Blog / 2024 / The Art of Titling Art
November 11, 2024
I recorded this video before the US presidential election, so it doesn’t directly address the anger and worry that many of us are feeling right now. Instead, like all my paintings and blog posts, this vlog an argument for a future where art matters more than ever.
Visual art and writing, music and theater as well as movies, TV shows, and video games: every kind of art connects us to our humanity.
And that’s powerful. The reason authoritarian governments throughout history have forced artists to create propaganda or face expulsion, imprisonment, or murder is because art makes people better. It helps us be more thoughtful, process our emotions, and learn different ways of expressing ourselves. It allows us to understand each other and, most importantly, it inspires us to want to understand each other.
In the case of visual art, that connection and human understanding can start with a title that acts as a doorway, and that’s what this video is all about.
On November 5th I was stuffing postcards of this image into 65 envelopes to send out to members of my monthly sticker club. It amused me to mail out this image on that day, because, like Schrödinger’s cat, American democracy felt both dead and alive on that day.
What I didn’t know then was that the balanced-on-a-knife-edge kind of uncertainty would continue. The best case scenario at this point is that American democracy remains Schrödinger’s cat for the entirety of the President-elect’s reign of cruelty. The alternative is that his deepest desires are realized.

Only This and Nothing More
2024
acrylic on panel
9 x 12 inches
This painting already has a forever home, but you can find prints and things in my print shop. You can also hire me to make you some custom art!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
“Think of the title as what frames the poem, the doorway through which your reader will enter the poem.”
This is a quote from the novel Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo.
I rather like this as an idea for titling visual art too. And it’s useful to have ideas like this floating around, because titling art is not easy.
I mean, sure, anyone can slap an “Untitled Number Whatever” on a piece and call it good. Or they can easily do the Captain Obvious equivalent of that and call it exactly what the image depicts. In this case, for example, the title could be “Cat Made of Space in a Cardboard Box.” But to find a group of words that act as a doorway is a little harder.
I certainly don’t manage it all the time, and I don’t think that either the “Untitled” approach or the Captain Obvious one are wrong, but I like to reach for the doorway-title now and again. I got there with this cat in a box, but only because the image began as a title—and as the history I had with the person who’d be getting this painting in the end.
To explain: I made this image for a friend and longtime supporter of my art who had bought the right to commission a painting from me by giving me just five words to work with. It was a special sort of custom art that I originally invented as a reward for supporting my 2023 Kickstarter, but I’d definitely do it again. I loved the challenge of it, the way it opened up my mind to new possibilities and associations.
The five words my friend gave me were: only this and nothing more.
Very meta, very him. Only these words and nothing more. I could have gone any number of ways once passing through this doorway—and I did. I wandered through lots of subjects before settling on a cat, because I know my friend loves his cat. The box followed shortly, because I liked the idea of how mundane it was—just a cat in a box and nothing more—but also because my mind went right to Schrödinger’s cat.
In Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment from 1935, a cat is imagined sealed off from view in a box with a complicated radioactive contraption that may or may not have killed the cat, based on the decay of a single atom. There are two impressive ideas contained in this thought experiment:
- The course of our world can be impacted by tiny things that seemingly have nothing to do with us, including the rate at which a single atom decays.
- Without being able to see into the box, the cat could be thought of as being both dead and alive at the same time, which is, of course, impossible, but which touches rather poetically on the strangeness of quantum physics as well as the unknowability of many aspects of our world.
That unknowability is a big idea about big things such as the existence of the universe, but it can just as easily be applied to why cats love boxes so much. Only This and Nothing More seemed an appropriate title for a cat made of cosmos contained in cardboard.
Maybe this post made you think of something you want to share with me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!
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