My new signature stamp

With only eight painting days left of the 30-Day Challenge I knew I had to make a decision – to sign or not to sign.   I used to always sign my paintings with “T.Harris” but a few years ago after seeing the Richter show I stopped signing my work on the front.   Plus, with small canvases I didn’t want to try and write my old signature, it would take up too much space.  What to do?

Catherine suggested I come up with a stamp.  I had thought previously about signing in katakana since I had planned to do all the paintings based on my tenkara adventures and I thought it would be cool to have the tenkara テ in there.   Today I played around with a few options.  I could do basically my initials in katakana which would be テハ, basically Ti-Ha, close to my old email address at Microsoft.   Or, I could do my first name in katakana – ティム.  

I also thought about Catherine’s stamp idea.  One of my painting instructors at the Academy was Milo Duke who had a cool stamp-like signature with a stylized M and D.   I checked out the paintings of his we had at the house and decided to try something similar.  I did a few sketches and finally got one I liked.   After running all the ideas by Catherine I decided to go with the stamp and today finally signed all the work I had done.   Now to start adding all the info on the back of the panels and finish the last paintings, drop off is only 10 days away.