Color War!

Wired has the best write-up I've seen on the feud between artists Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple over the rights to the blackest BLACK and the pinkest PINK. 

HERE.

Public domain image from Publicdomainpictures.net

Death of a Frog

A while back I wrote about copyright and design theft (HERE) and talked about Pepe the Frog, a cartoon slacker-amphibian stolen by the alt-right for neo-Nazi and other hateful memes.  

Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, tried to fight, to rescue his creation, to rehabilitate him.  (I picture a sort of drying-out clinic/swamp for skinhead amphibians - filled with repentant Amazonian poison frogs in gang coloration, taking the twelve-leap program.  The original, innocent Pepe might have appreciated that image.)  His creator tried to save him.  But now...?  Now he's still listed by the Anti-defamation League as a hate symbol.  Now even his creator has had to give him up as irredeemable.

A guilty frog.

Collage from Public Domain images (and poor, poor Pepe)

Pepe is, of course, the copyrighted creation of Matt Furie... who I hope 

will not object to this use here - I believe it's fair use as satire/commentary

on the situation.  I think it's fair use...  Mr Furie?  

Just let me know if you disagree.  And best wishes on suing the alt.right!

I joke - sorta - but it's not funny.  

It proved impossible to save Pepe from the haters.  Just as many other artists find it impossible to assert their copyright when their works are stolen for profit .  And all the online fans who previously created joyful or silly memes now have to concede that Pepe The Frog is lost to them too.  

This is why we can't have nice things.  

Today Matt Furie killed off Pepe.  

Today, on Free Comic Book Day, is Pepe's wake.  Read more HERE.

ADDENDUM: Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, is suing prominent alt-right members who have used his cartoon frog without permission!  He's already won a case against one dope (official legal term there) who used Pepe in a right-wing children's book. More on this development HERE and HERE.

Setting the Art Free

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced that it's set 375,000 art images free.

Fly!  Be free!

All under a Creative Commons 0 license HERE... which means you can do what you like with 'em.  

Free I tell you!

PS In all my excitement I forgot to tell you that the wonderful falcon is ancient Egyptian, the sky a study by John Singer Sargeant, and both live at the terrific Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.  Go visit.

I Needed the Laugh

Awards can get a little... crazy.  

I just found out this year's nominations for The Column Awards.  

Perhaps you remember a couple of earlier posts of mine on the intricacies of scenic design and plagiarism versus legitimate reuse etc.  HERE and HERE. The short version is that a tree - and the rest of its set - for A Midsummer's Night's Dream somehow ended up, to its designer's surprise, on stage again as a set for Camelot.

A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Trinity Shakespeare Festival - 

set design DEFINITELY by Bob Lavallee

Camelot, Lyric Stage - photographer unknown 

set design still by Bob Lavallee... or, and... well, it's complicated

So... now BOTH sets have been nominated for awards!  The Shakespeare play's set as "Best Original Scenic Design of a Play - Equity" and its Camelot zombie-after-life as "Best Original Scenic Design of a Musical - non-Equity."  This is credited to both it's actual designer and to its imaginary nom-de-repaint-it-we-won't-say-plagiarism designer, Cornelius Parker.  

That rascal.

Ha!

As a side note, I am appropriately honored to discover that two shows of my own are also so honored:  Kind Lady, for Mainstage Irving-Las Colinas and The Winter's Tale, for Trinity Shakespeare Festival.  

But I'll happily lose - twice! - to that gorgeous tree.

PS I'd be very happy to credit the photographer of that Camelot photo if anyone knows?

Save Pepe!

Artists and designers get their work stolen.

Especially online.

I just listened to an interview with the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog... an innocent, laid-back. peace-loving frog who's been co-opted by the alt.right in current politics as an ugly hate meme.  You can listen HERE on RiYL.

His creator, Matt Furie, seems like a really good guy - perplexed by this evil hijacking of his work.  

Copyrighted artwork, by the way.  But good luck suing neo-Nazis over copyright infringement, huh?  

See more at Art by Matt Furie.

Public domain frog image

Earlier posts on misuse of other designers' designs HERE and HERE.

Cornelius Parker, You Rascal You

Yesterday's post on set design reuse and attribution (HERE) has developed legs...

The story in Theater Jones (HERE) inspired another one at the Arts Integrity Initiative (HERE) with the perfect title:

"When a Tree Falls in Athens and Rises in Camelot, Whose Design is it Anyway?"

Most good designers understand the ethics of their branch of design instinctively (besides, where's the fun if you just steal another guy's design?), but it's worthwhile discussing these matters.  When is recycling and reuse fair and when is it theft?  What is plagiarism and what is inspiration?  How much "sampling" or borrowing is okay and how much is Too Much?

Fair questions.

And the answers are going to vary somewhat from one type of design to another.  For instance, using recycled or stock pieces is legit in theater design (and so eco-sustainable and budget-helpful that we should do it and have a tradition of doing it), but every ethical designer knows that means mix-n-matching bits from many shows then seriously rethinking and redesigning those pieces into a new, original - collaging - not just repainting and changing the designer's name.  Yeesh.  

But even other kinds of designers don't always understand theater design ethics.  Architect friends don't quite get the nuances... seeing as built buildings don't often pick up and move on (as sets or costumes often do).  In architecture it's more often a matter of "did your drawings get reused without agreement?" not "did that porch get trucked away?"  Even then it's looked at as a theft from the physical owner - like stealing a sofa - rather than as a theft from the designer... 

...unless the designer and building are very famous.  There are loud art/ethical questions about removing the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon or selling bits of Greene and Greene's Blacker House for profit and replacing them (in the house) with reproductions.  The DMA has the real front door.

IMAGINE PICTURE OF
BLACKER HOUSE DOOR
HERE

The Dallas Museum of Art has such legalese copyright policy that, frankly, I'm frightened to use their photo here even with attribution on this fair-use-y post.  They don't seem worried about vulture-picking the carcass of that great artwork the Blacker House, but I bet they're pretty defensive of the copyright of the photo of their loot.  

So. 

Cornelius Parker?  He's the unethical (and imaginary) theater designer who reused a fellow designer's work without informed permission, appropriate payment, or full attribution.

Still a gorgeous tree. 

Public Domain Treasure

The Interwebs just get more interesting all the time: today's special is a new-to-me site for public domain book illustrations.  Wonderful Stuff!

OldBookIllustrations.com

A 12th century half timber house drawn by Viollet-le-Duc

at www.oldbookillustrations.com

The treasure trove of public domain material easy to access via the computer on your desk - or on your lap, or in your hand - is becoming a wellspring of inspiration...  I just wish countries would stop extending and/or enlarging copyright protections to unreasonable limits.  The UK is heading toward a redefinition of copyright that would make it illegal to stick a photo of your (English) sofa on Craig's List.  (Is there Craig's List in the UK?  Maybe not for long!)  HERE's an article on that silliness at BoingBoing.

I'm all for copyright - I copyright stuff myself after all - the rules just need to be fair and sensible.  A family snapshot sitting on its own sofa ought not to be illegal, huh?  Or that for-sale photo either.

(For more on copyright issues, look in my Set Design Archive under, um, "Copyright.")

PS.  That house pictured above?  Torn down.  Like Kitchen Dog Theater's home of 20 years will be.  Don't forget our new-home fund raiser - see blog post below.  
The Deadline Approacheth!

Copyright and Trolls

I've written about copyright before (check the ol' Archive if interested), but here's a heads-up! on Patent Trolls.

Before starting...  We do remember that using other people's work without permission is Wrong, right?

But say you do borrow something and transform it fundamentally (fair use) or you ask or pay for permission for this use or you create every fragment yourself from scratch.  Anything that ends up on the internet is susceptible to challenge from those nasty trolls that extort money (which seems to seldom make it back to actual creators) for copyright or patent infringement.  The courts are starting to wise up to the trolls - but who wants to go to court?

Anyway.

BoingBoing has a ridiculous example of this kind of trolling today: a magazine shaken down for use of An Ink Blot.

Not this one - this is a free image from i2Clipart.com

Seriously.  You can get grief from using a splatter of ink - in this magazine's case perfectly legitimately.  Luckily their cover designer kept good records of their image sources.

So be careful out there!

Copyright Week

Tardy (as often) I'm finally getting around to posting on the topic of Copyright Week.

There's a great, in-depth explanation of the issues of copyright, free speach, and public domain HERE at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  It's a topic I'm very interested in.

Why do I care?

Well... It started out as a matter of self-protection.  I make collages and I wanted to be sure that I didn't create copyright problems for myself.  Sure I wanted to preserve the rights of the other artists who created any images I wanted to "borrow" in my work, I didn't want to steal or abuse... but largely I wanted to be sure I didn't get in trouble.  Brave huh?

Secondarily, as a creator of content myself, I wanted to understand my rights.  I have had a design or two stolen.

So I started studying copyright.

Frankly, the law - U.S. and international - is a mess and too much under the control of ignorant legislators being led around on leashes by Big Media and Big Pharma... by the big-money interested in highly restrictive and overly-long-term rules.  At the same moment, we the public are recipients of a wonderful bonanza of public domain sharing due to the now-ripening of Victorian creativity into our joint ownership (which is what public domain means) and the unprecedented ease and freedom to share that is the internet.

Exciting times.

Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland - and that story too - are now in the Public Domain.  So it's fair game for me to adopt Alice as my blog's avatar, then give her a cool pedal car and a Victorian love seat to deliver to a theater for me.  Putting earlier artists' creations to present-day use.  Go! Public Domain!

I believe that as a society we need both robust copyright protections so that creators' benefit from their work AND lively sharing and free use of ideas (written and imaged) so we can go create more cool ideas!  Getting that balance right is the trick.

Look into the topic yourself.  Develop some informed opinions.  Then let your congress people know what they should think, huh?

Earlier posts on copyright: Copyright On Copyright and the Public Domain SNIPPET # 7  Copyright on the Internet Copyright Has Never Been This Cute

Copyright Has Never Been This Cute

This morning on BoingBoing (a terrific site BTW) there was this lovely video: created by You Tube to explain copyright to video folks, it also pretty well explains the law as it applies to most visual arts and music.

Best of all, it is explained by puppets.

Wouldn't ALL law be more palatable if explained by puppets?

Maybe that explains those British wigs in court?  And maybe in the U.S. we should insist that all lawyers similarly dress up funny or use puppets or, preferably, mime?  (Having to act out, say, "intestate" would make lawyers simplify their arguments!)

Watch it HERE.

My earlier posts on copyright issues HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Copyright on the Internet

I've recently exchanged emails with a very nice photographer about the use of photos on the internet.  Raised a lot of issues.  This particular photographer - and I think most others - is having a very big problem with people snatching their work without permission or credit.

The idea of copyright on a photo by its photographer is something the public - especially on-line - just doesn't understand.

The confusion is natural: a photo, at least a documentary life-as-it-is sort of photograph... well, it just doesn't seem created to an ordinary person.  People can, generally, understand that a drawing requires an artist or that a clay bowl has a potter, but a photo...?  Isn't that just life (almost by definition Public Domain) caught as anyone can with their camera-phone?  (Anyone but me, I'm a terrible photographer!)  Most people do not look at an unposed, unmanipulated, documentary photo and even think Photographer.  They see only the subject.  Which might well be in the public domain.

Actually, I kinda lean this way myself.

I tend to agree with Wikimedia and others' theory that a straightforward documentary photo that reproduces a public domain subject should, itself, be public domain. I mean, the Mona Lisa is loooong out of copyright; why should an ordinary just-the-facts-ma'am photo of her be copyrighted?  The next 100 pro or amateur photos will be identical to it.  And how else can the Public of the public domain interact with Mona without some photo?  Not like the Louvre's going to let anyone take her home on loan.

Or like paying to use that generic photo will help Da Vinci pay rent.  The point of copyright is to help support the people - artist or engineer etc. - who make a New Thing.  Copyright is intended to encourage innovation.

Now Andy Warhol's version of Mona Lisa?  THAT obviously deserves copyright because it is unique to Warhol and his experience of the painting.  Likewise, if a photographer took a non-documentary version of Da Vinci's painting... strangely and uniquely lit, perhaps, or manipulated  in the lab or digitally into some personal vision, then that too would be copyrighted.  (Please remember these are my personal musings here, not actual copyright Law, which is weird and sometimes deeply stupid.)

Likewise, to my way of thinking, most what I'll call Travel Photography ought, I think, to be uncopyrightable.    The pyramids, for instance...  It'd take an awfully special photo to see those in a unique way after humans have been staring at them for millenia and photographing them for more than a century.  Still possible though.

Photographers are in a similar position now to where portrait painters were when photography was invented: the mere recording of fact is suddenly possible for anyone and therefore devalued; what IS still valuable is a unique artistic viewpoint.  Sargeant's painted portraits do not just record facts about his sitters.  Ansel Adams' photos of Yosemite do not just record the shapes of rocks.

I dare all the camera-phone folks to match their insights.

Meanwhile, here's a reminder of actual copyright law online or off - as I understand it.  (I do try to obey copyright law.)  All those pretty pictures out there, a click away, were taken by someone.  And those someones have the only right to use the image unless you get permission or they have given it a Creative Commons license (read that fine print) or declared it Public Domain OR (and this is a big, messy, legal-and-artistic OR) you use it in a Fair Use way.

Fair Use is a whole 'nother post!

Anyway, in the process of my emailing on this topic, I created a little sketch to replace a photo so that I would have no copyright questions hanging.  Here's that sketch:

Sketch of alphabet blocks by Clare Floyd DeVries - gifted to the Public Domain

In the spirit of... neighborliness or something, I want to just hand this sketch out to anyone -  do what you want with it.  As much as the law allows I gift it to the Public Domain.  Fly!  Be free.  If you want to credit me, that's kind; if you find a way to make a gadjillion dollars off it and want to send me some bucks, thank you very much, but you don't need to.  It's all yours.

ADDENDUM x 2: For a fascinating legal discussion of copyright, fair use, and photography read this article at Art in America HERE about the recent court decision in the Richard Prince case, which finds in favor of "transforming" photos by others into new works.  And HERE is another court decision that is chilling to claims of photographers for the "transformative" nature of photography itself.  In this case the photo was of copyrighted art by someone else.  (My gut feeling about documentary versus unique view-point manipulated photos may actually hold some legal water.)

Anyway, photographers and photography are clearly under siege today... And the front line may be the internet.

Gesture Sketches

Yeesh.  Yesterday's POST  about my visit to the Impressionist exhibit at the Kimbell got complicated.

So... In lieu of pretty colored photos of those paintings, here are my fast gesture-drawings of them.

You'll see that these sketches are much more limited - no color for one thing - and there's little attempt be accurate in proportion or complete in detail.  But the nice thing about gesture-drawing as I was taught it is that it can catch a surprising amount of the feeling of subject.  These particular sketches weren't intended for publication, were meant as memory joggers, but yet... they do that job surprisingly well.

Portrait of Madame Monet by Renoir, gesture sketch by Clare Floyd DeVries

With this sketch I wanted to catch the Madonna-icon-like composition and the dark emphasis of Madame Monet's head (oddly enough, both aspects are less obvious in photos).  I think this is one of the reasons artists are taught to study by and through drawing - it makes you LOOK and NOTICE.

Various paintings from the Clark Art Institute at the Kimbell Art Museum, sketches by Clare Floyd DeVries

On this sketchbook page you can see my slap-happy composition of notes and sketches.  

I have a post card of Berthe Morisot's The Bath in front of me as I type; my scribble actually catches the interrupted-in-motion pose of the woman fixing her hair pretty well, but misses her challenging stare.  It's a lovely painting, all pastel-like pinks and that distinctive Impressionist blue, so much a part of Renoir's palette.  (The audio tour calls the bathtub "white" but its lining looks darn blue to me, its outside copper or rust).  Despite the pretty "feminine" colors and pose, this girl might be a tough cookie.

Also on this page is a fast-fast gesture drawing of Renoir's Sleeping Girl which, for me, ought to be titled Striped Socks.  There's something wonderfully real and quirky about those socks with blue stripes.  Cradled by the warm red chair, the girl's head, sleepy pose, drooping chemise... all standard loose woman issue... she could be anyone; but the sleeping cat is quite particular and those socks?  Unique.  I believe in this girl because of her socks.

You'll note that I wrote about Renoir's Onions but did not sketch them.  A B&W sketch would miss everything important: the wonderful brushwork and the color - the shimmer and translucence of coppery onion skin, the creamy, shadowy folds in the white cloth, the blue of the wall.

Saint-Charles, Eagny by Pissarro, Clark Art Institute at the Kimbell, sketch by Clare Floyd DeVries

Here I tried to catch only the tones of Pissarro's landscape - the darkness of these slender trunked trees against the sunlight.  There was a thin, thin, thin golden edge to the crest of the hill that I could not sketch, only label.  This view is painted at a long-shadows time of day (feels like morning to me) so that trees and hills are backlit and edges are gilded.  Unusually for Pissarro, this is painted in Pointillist style - an insanely slow way to get paint on a canvas.  No wonder Pissarro moved on to other methods, but this painting is very beautiful.

Okay.  There's the  Impressionists illustrated.  

Good show - at the Kimbell Art Museum - go see it!

BTW About copyright for my own sketches and photos.  Anyone who wishes to use them electronically (as in a blog) or Pin to them, or copy them for personal use or, heck, for trading cards! is welcome - though no selling them, please.  If you would credit them to me and link back, I'd appreciate it.

Speaks for Itself

I'm guessin' this sign is now in the public domain...? 

Not sure who Betty Willis is, but if she tweaked this,she did a wonderful job.  Image is to be found (or at least Google ascribes this image to) Harrah's Las Vegas blog.