Not a painting. That’s a digital print on canvas with some slight, lazy hand application of media. He’s not a painter.
Cough Pinkcat cough.
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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.
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“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
-Picasso Me. I said that.
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Banksy also said it but he ain’t no Picasso.
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It is not as though it is difficult to find a free-to-use image, for example, here.
Photographers and models will often respond positively if a request is made, although I never feel comfortable with accepting a freebie from people who are working, there are tons of life models on Patreon and Only Fans who offer images at extremely reasonable prices.
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Ok, yes if we are just talking about faces.
But when people say just take your own photos, I’m thinking of architecture, animals, landscape etc.
And again, I don’t paint photo realistic portraits, and I have weird tastes. Free image sites are not as useful if you are looking for weird outfits etc.
I do work from my own photos as much as possible and alot of my stuff is more amalgamation of elements but I just did a quick search of the site you linked for subjects I’ve looked up in the past and found no or few examples.
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But did you ever try to pass those pieces off as entirely your own? Or did you do what an ethical artist would do and credit the original photos and the original photographer? Maybe even include a blurb with any exhibition explaining how you chose the reference photos? Sounds like you were both honest about where your subjects and composition originated and weren’t doing photo realism, which allowed you to make artistic choices when painting that substantially differentiated your pieces from your references. Btw, if you have photos, I’d love to see them in the making/crafting thread. I don’t think we have a separate art thread.
I don’t see anything wrong with using someone else’s photos as references if the artist has permission, ideally, and at the least makes it clear the original composition was from a photo by someone else. I think most people and most artists think that’s fine.
This jerk not only didn’t credit the original artists, he changed almost nothing when painting, he accepted prizes without revealing the composition was entirely someone else’s work, and then decided to lecture the artist whose work he stole and profited from. To make it even more odious, that artist was a woman so it came off as the worst kind of mansplaining and condescension. Like her work was worth nothing until he painted a copy.
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I haven’t gotten a chance to exhibit them yet and I don’t know if I could credit them. I just collected a huge folder of photos as the disaster was unfolding, most of it was probably amateur shots, some were just stills from video cameras that had been left running but I might have used something taken by a professional photographer, I honestly don’t know.
Most of the phots were grainy, I wasn’t looking for high detail anyway. I was not using perfectly framed photos intended for an art gallery, I don’t think anyone took anything like that anyway, but it’s likely, almost certain, that some of the photos in my folder were taken by journalists.
I was a “failed artist” that had every reason to believe that all my past work had just been destroyed in storage and I started painting a series about the destruction of my home.
The point I was trying to make was that this guy is doing something pretty scummy. He’s in the actual art world, making money, and basically cloning other peoples work.
My problem is when this trickles down into shouting matches on places like DevArt or Instagram where people are accused of being thieves for doing the kind of referencing that has honestly happened for centuries. Hiring models is old but paying for reference is extremely modern and I don’t think we are working with a reasonable set of rules under current copyright laws, I think it currently fails both artists and models.
There are certainly working models getting ripped off but there is also a rush to extract “value” from every possible human interaction or exchange that is just unhealthy.
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I suppose you would have to be more specific as to what constitutes weird
This or this might be a start. You are unlikely to find exactly what you want in every case, but you could probably amalgamate or develop to what you desire.
Slightly better, fair. But I still rankle at very strict moral imperatives for paying for any form of reference or only using stock photos. I still don’t think it’s actually a healthy mindset to try to commodify all imagery to that degree and to limit interactions with imagery to that degree.
I’m not actually saying your instincts are not correct either, it’s more that we all live in a space with very different conflicting instincts about how we should approach these issues.
For instance I wouldn’t feel at all weird for charging for modeling or even for access to my photos in certain forums. (I am a person who is naked on the internet in a number of places.) But I would feel pretty weird about trying to charge someone just to paint or draw something using a photo that I took or a photo of myself. I do tend to mark my photos as such when appropriate.
I don’t like the idea at all that I just need to give up on a piece if I can’t put together everything I want from a stock site, or that I’m not allowed to be inspired by random finds. It’s just so clinical and pecuniary.
I might get an angry letter one day, I probably won’t ever be important enough to notice. It really is only a handful of works where I think it would even be possible for someone to notice.
I’m also not saying I’m right, just really tired and frustrated. I have terrible social anxiety. I don’t want to email randos. I don’t want to make anyone mad. But I also don’t want to work in strict constraints that feel super artificial and frankly paranoid after a point.
And the internet is full of people with even stricter ideas than you have. There really is no safe line in the IP discussion. Even taking your own photos there are people who believe you should get the permission of architects, clothing designers, or furniture designers. That you can’t paint objects or clothing you own if they are or use recognizable characters or design elements. I’ve had a copywrite claim on a painted self portrait because I was holding a Hello Kitty doll in it.
I’m admittedly over emotional about the subject based on my anxiety issues.
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Frankly, it also depends on the artist.
Abbott Thayer used his own children as models most of the time (free child labor!), Norman Rockwell used his own photographs heavily, but was very secretive about it, and a living artist, Malcolm Liepke, uses magazine photos as reference material (but his work is so stylized, it actually is transformative).
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Richard Estes’ career has entered the chat…
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I am not trying to proscribe or inhibit artistic endeavour. My initial response was mainly that if the artist wanted to paint a vague Asian woman based on the subject of Turandot, he might have been inspired by the original photograph and did not want to contact the photographer (for whatever reason), he could have found a number of resources which contained the elements he wanted to use that were freely available. I can fully understand the frustration and anger of the photographer, she has the moral right to protect her work (which, since it was a shoot for Vogue, was probably commercially protected too).
I mainly work (not professionally) with drawing life models I rarely go beyond drawings but will occasionally go back through them to find a subject for a linocut or screen print and even more rarely make a painting. In this process I am happily able to access a large variety of models but before I join a group/class I satisfy myself that the model is being properly recompensed (there have been a number of recent outcries that models are paid only when they are posing, not for the preparatory work/travel/cancellations etc.; conditions that are safe, cleanish). In the recent lockdowns that live event has been transferred to online events – still drawing a person(s) posing live rather than a photograph – this has put more pressure on the models (because they are often working alone, operating cameras, administering access etc.). So if I seem strict it is only that I want to be sure that I am not exploiting, I have modelled myself occasionally in the dim and distant past – pre-internet and barely at all since internet and cameras in every phone.
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