Studio Friday -- choosing a name

Studio Friday's challenge this week is Choosing your Mature Artist Name.

Susan suggested this theme:

This week's subject seems appropriate for the New Year. In fact that is what I was thinking when I suggested it! Here's what I wrote - "I've been reading Twyla Thorpe's book The Creative Habit and here's an idea from her book - "the ancient masters of Japanese art were allowed to change their names once in their lifetime. They had to be very selective about the moment in their career when they did so. They would stick with their given name until they felt they had become the artist they aspired to; at that point they were allowed to change their name. For the rest of their life, they would work under that name at the height of their powers." So let's presume we are at the height of our careers - what name would you choose and why?"

I, too, have been reading the very same book. (I recommend it!)

So let's see. What name would I choose?

I am not crazy about being a 50-something adult person with a cute diminutive nickname.

Victoria is a nice solid name, and the success part of the meaning is just fine. I'd rather it wasn't a feminine version of a male name...............

I guess I'd go with Victoria (and do, generally, when I'm introducing myself in new situations).

As for last name...................

For a long time, I have thought that it would be very cool if we all hyphenated our names. Babies would take the "father-line" name from their dad's name, and the "mother-line" name from their mom's name. That way we would all have a strand of our mother's heritage in our names, as well as having our father's.

As an example, Ann Sallysdaughter-Thomsdaughter and Mark Bettyson-Richardson's new daughter would be Madison Sallysdaughter-Richardsdaughter. Not that the names would all end in -daughter or -son (though a lot of names people use now do take just that form), but just to show the pattern......

Getting from here to there is not really do-able, unless we just start somewhere and pretend that the father-line name our mothers or grandmothers had was our mother-line, or if we were to make something up for our mother-line name.....

I think it would be so cool if we had both names -- imagine looking back at your family tree -- there would be twice as much name-heritage-information........