Here, Richard Ensing signs his painting in a bold red. An artist's signature is a calling card. Signing a painting claims ownership, gives additional value, and marks it as a complete, sellable piece. However many artists struggle with signing their paintings.
The addition of artist's signature can feel jarring to the painting if done incorrectly. Figuring out what your signature needs to be is an important part of establishing yourself as an artist. A signature is meant to be a part of your painting. It ought to effortlessly complement the rest of the painting without drawing undue attention to itself.
With thought and some practice, your signature can do just that and become a seamless addition to your paintings. Your signature should feel like your work. It should feel like punctuation at the end of a thoughtful personal monologue. Courtesy of The Art League. The first question an artist's signature must answer is the identity of the artist.
When signing a painting it must be clear who has painted the piece. If you choose to sell your work, a signature is a business card, it tells people who created the painting. With that information, they can find your website or information to contact you. Your artist's signature should be consistent. If you choose to sign with your first initial and last name, then have that be a harmonious part of your work.
Changing the name on your paintings often will make it difficult to identify your work. A first name or initial and last name usually does the trick. Because a signature is an integrated piece of the painting, many artists sign as they work, rather than at the very end. This allows the signature to become a part of the painting. Black chalk and pencil, watermark crowned fleur-de-lys with a countermark M. An even more unusual case is that of a drawing by Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, whose portrait of King Louis XVI was mistakenly considered to depict a woman, until about Although signatures can confirm well-founded research, they can also be misleading.
The painting was probably doctored during the Second World War in order to obscure the fact that the artist was Jewish, and to save his work from being confiscated or destroyed. After its provenance was questioned in the real signature was uncovered in the bottom right-hand side of the piece, and the false version was removed. After seeing numerous works signed by an artist, you also develop a familiarity with how they sign and inscribe. Of course you can also put the painting under a UV light.
If the signature has been added at a later date, the difference in pigment will show up by flaring. Rooth also looks out for artists who might have minimal signatures. When considering whether to invest in a work of art it is important to know whether an artist normally autographs their work. Maybe, like some of the artists who don't sign at all, they they believe their work is universally recognizable and no one will ever forget who they are or ever question who made their art.
The truth about that? Nothing is further from the truth. To summarize, rule number one is to always sign your art. It can be on the back, the bottom, the sides, the edges-- anywhere as long as it's there. And rule number two is to sign your name clearly enough so that anyone can read it.
To repeat: Sign your name so anyone can read it. If you like signing illegibly on the front, that's fine as long as you make sure you clearly sign or otherwise label or identify yourself as the artist somewhere else on the art. Speaking of illegible signatures, here's one for you Good luck. I don't have a clue. Sadly, so many artist signatures on all kinds of art, dating from all time periods, are so difficult or impossible to read that they've become a significant problem in the business, and trying to identify them, an industry in itself.
But as good as that database is, it's far from comprehensive. FYI, I actually offer a service where I charge a fee to identify indecipherable signatures and only charge if I make positive identification, which sometimes I can, but many times I can't. How does art lose its identity even though people almost always know who the artists are when they buy?
To begin with, people buy art all the time purely for their own enjoyment, and never tell anyone who the artists are. During the life of the art, many art owners either lose or misplace their receipts or documentation, or just throw them out. People buy art all the time and forget who the artists are.
People sell, donate, trade, transfer or otherwise give away art all the time without ever informing the new owners who the artists are-- like when they move or downsize their residences, redecorate, have yard sales, or when they just plain get tired of looking at it.
Art can also lose its identity when it changes hands through death, divorce, inheritance, as gifts, and so on. Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Let's say someone buys a piece of art with an illegible signature for a hundred bucks at an artist's first show just because she likes it and can afford it the artist, of course, is totally unknown at the time. The buyer doesn't really follow the career of the artist and some years later because she's moving or her tastes have changed or whatever, she gives the art to an acquaintance who happens to like the way it looks.
The new owner doesn't ask who it's by, doesn't really care, and the original owner doesn't bother mentioning who did it assuming she even remembers because after all, she got it cheap and it was no big deal at the time. The artist was a nobody. Are you beginning to get the picture? Believe it or not, things like this happens a lot more often than you might think. If artists had any idea of the fates that befall unsigned works of art art or those with signatures that can't be identified, a lot more artists would sign their art clearly and legibly.
It's not like people don't try to figure out who made unsigned or illegibly signed art. They try to decipher the names by looking at them. They search randomly online, ask artists or gallery owners or other art professionals if they recognize the art or the names, try to locate similar looking artworks online, or even hire someone who offers identification services to decipher them like me; I signature ID requests all the time. Whenever a work of art ends up in circumstances like this where nobody knows, remembers or can identify the artist, and nobody really likes or cares all that much about it forget about how good it may be or how famous the artist is , it ends up at flea markets, garage sales, auctions, the Salvation Army, Joe's Maison de Junk, in the garbage, in the fireplace, garages, attics, gathering mold in basements or outbuildings, getting crammed into storage lockers, protecting barbeque grills from the rain, or becoming toys for little Billy-- you name it.
Do you want to jeopardize your art's future simply because you don't want to sign it or you like signing in ways that are difficult to read? I doubt it.
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