I think there is alot of room between this kind of complete cloning of someone else’s work and only working from reference photos that you’ve taken yourself.
I understand the urge to say “just take your own photos” because it eliminates any gray area or dispute but it’s really limiting to someone who doesn’t have a ton of resources. And there are a lot of people who make occasional sales but are not really “working artists.”
Yeah, I am being a little defensive about my own work here.
Especially the series I painted right after Katrina. It was important to me at the time to paint real scenes that had happened but much of the motivation for the series was that I couldn’t immediately return home. I was using a more abstracted style but in that case I didn’t want to make any changes to composition that made the scene no longer a true event.
I do think there is less room for using the photos of other people the less stylized the work is.
