The Door
Albright was interviewed by Vermont Public Radio in 1978. He says that to make That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, which is 8 feet tall and three feet wide, he cut a hole in the floor of his studio and rested it four feet below the floor, raising and lowering it as he painted. He says he painted about he painted about ½ square inch a day, and never changed anything as he went.
Here’s what he says about his titles:
I will tell you why. When I was a boy I met all of these artists and they would have titles like Boys Sitting by a Stream, The Sunshine on the Girl’s Hat, Girl Holding a Daisy, Boy Eating an Apple. I got pretty tired of them. I heard them from 1903 until 1920. I probably was the first one who decided not to have those titles; I was going to have something that the painting said.
If you know art and like art, you will see so much in it. I thought, to help people along, I would take a title with a little other, you might say, dimension. If, for instance, I bring a picture of Ida into the world, it becomes Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida. She was a 20-year-old married woman, and I knew they were going to call her a prostitute and ugly, so I called her a soul. Not everybody can call a soul a prostitute.
I like to get a little bit of my philosophy in the title, and I like That Which I Should Have Done. It happens to almost everybody, almost every day."
Source- http://my.firedoglake.com/masaccio/2011/01/22/saturday-art-that-which-i-should-have-done-i-did-not-do-the-door-by-ivan-albright/
