Everyone steals...
Okay so this post is coming from my rather bitchy tweets yesterday regarding the annoying little girls that call themselves 'Team Dearman' and now also 'Team Alan' on twitter, whom I don't follow but went and had a nose at how ridiculous they and their tweets are (yeah I was bored and a few minutes of feeling intellectually and well just generally superior provided me with some entertainment). What I found was one of my own photographs of Alan and Louise posted with some slight editing to it.
Before I get unceremoniously shoved off my moral high ground by reminders that I steal images off the net constantly and use them within my own artwork (sketches as well as photoshoped images) lets get clear that the copying, saving and using of it I didn't object to. In fact I'd anticipated it when I sent this specific version of the photograph to Louise (the full colour one as the Black & White was reserved for only a few of us) and I reduced the resolution by a whole hell of a lot. Cos, ya know, the pretty full res version is mine and I don't really like sharing hehe
It was the sheer laziness of the reproduction I found annoying. Save image, put through iPhone filter (Instagram, one click and you're done) and re-post. All I could think was that they could of at least tried to put a little creative thought and effort in, even if they didn't have any great talent to back it up.
I remember spending weeks on a particular piece of artwork in photoshop, working 2 separate pictures into the one image I wanted to create. The finished product was something new and distinct from its constituent parts. And I was lucky to have had photoshop, I know others who created amazing images out of awful programmes like the original Paint Shop Pro!
And doing away with the generalisations, I'd already put my original photograph into photoshop and tweaked all the colours, levels, brightness and contrast manually so it was a tad insulting to see it get put through instagram.
Whether it be pictures, paintings, music, film, novels... any piece of artwork... we will always 'borrow' ideas from others; human experience means we can't help but be influenced by things around us and that influence will seep into our own creations. What a person takes away from hearing a beautiful piece of music they might express through their own, a line read from a book could spring forth an entire story from another person, a glance captured in a photograph can stir a simple sketch or a rich painting.
My subject line was 'Everyone steals...' , here's the full quote and the full intent of my post-
"Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly." Johannes Brahms