Marketing Mondays: Signing Your Work

In several recent conversations with artists, the subject arose of where we sign our work. To be honest I hadn’t thought much about it. I sign my work on paper with my last name on the front in the conventional right hand corner. I sign my paintings with my full name on the back so as not to interfere with the edge-to-edge color field.

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Then the issue of size came up: How big do you make the signature if you sign on the front? My printed last name is in pencil, smallish. 

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And then the issue of dating the work: Do you? Don’t you?  I date where I sign, and I do date because each painting or body of work on paper has a particular place in the development of my oeuvre.

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Scrolling through a Facebook post on the topic, I found a number of artists who feel that signing on the front is the mark of an amateur, others who sign on the front and have done so for years, and still others who front sign using their initials only. Some front signers do so large, others small; some quietly, others in-your-face boldly. Some artists date their work, some don’t. What seemed so routine to me turns out to be rather quite complicated.

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Where to sign?

I asked Marcia Wood, owner/director of the gallery that bears her name in Atlanta, for her thoughts on the issue (disclaimer: Wood represents me). “Almost no contemporary artists I am aware of put their signature on the front of paintings,” she says.

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Why? “It’s all about the integrity and importance of the image.”

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Picasso—whose has probably the most widely identified artist signature in the world—might have disagreed, and there are others, including some early Rymans with the name so large it’s part of the composition, but I’m with Wood on this. Imagine a Bridget Riley canvas with a signature, or a Rothko.

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Bridget Riley standing before  Après-Midi, 1981, oil on linen, 91 x 77.75 inches. You're not likely to find a signature on the front

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Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1958; casein, colored pencil, and charcoal on paper, 9 3/8 × 9 3/8 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art

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What about work on paper?

“Paintings and photographs are usually edge to edge. Work on paper has some sense of background, or margins—a stopping point for the image—and the signing is always outside the stopping point.”

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And dating the work?

“Dating is placing the work in your span of ideas and growth as an artist so it’s historically relevant.” Down the road, she notes, when a curator or art historian is looking at your work, the dates provide a reasonable guide to the development of your work. “The date helps the catalog.”

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Ultimately, says Wood, “The location of the signature doesn't matter to my collectors. It does matter sometimes to people who are not art savvy and think that if there isn't a signature on the front the work is somehow suspect. Or they need an explanation why it's not on the front."

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On the other hand, Wood notes, “Folk, naive, and outsider artists almost always sign the fronts.”

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For those of you who think where we sign is less important that what we're signing, you know what's coming. "The main signifier," says Wood, "still needs to be the quality of the art itself."

Possibly the most famous folk artist ever: Grandma Moses, The Pond

(You can make out her surname at the bottom center, between the figure and the fence)

 

Digital watermarking
Finally there's the issue of watermarking an image to prevent cyber misuse. I'd show you an image or two, but they're copyrighted so I can't. But I think we can all agree that if the watermark interferes with the viewing of the image—and some do—then it's too large. I understand that you don't want people to steal your image, but you want viewers to be able to see it.

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As always, your comments are essential to this conversation.