What a week!

Whoa, this was some week. It started on Monday, when my client came to view "A Change in Circumstance" and told me that she thought it may be overwhelming for her room. She may be right. My work is NOT timid. It's visually commanding. That's what I do. She took the work home. On Monday the 13th, she will let me know whether she can live with it or not. If she can't, well then it will be entered into the Roddy Competition, just squeezing in at the maximum size.

Then, another prospective client called, having seen my work at an other's home. She came by and picked up pieces to show her daughter, husband, and designer. Yes, that is four people to please..a challenge. They didn't agree on the paintings I submitted BUT they all did like my Clothesline Paintings, so I may get to paint one for them after all. And that segueways into the most interesting story of the week:

So I am doing the Green Clothesline painting for a client in Toronto. (I am so happy it's green..did I say that already?) I decided to Google "clothesline paintings " in "Google Images" to see whether my paintings came up . Well two paintings came up that looked like my pictures but were NOT MY PAINTINGS. Yes, everyone, another artists out there violated the copy right laws and made derivative art from my protected material, oh yeah and tried to tell all sorts of lies about it.

At first the business manager for this West Coast artist tried to argue that the "artist" had used personal family photos from 1999 and that MY paintings may be in violation. Well, here I am holding my original photographs, my reference material, taken in 2002. My images were put on my husband's website (with my permission) in 2002 and I am listening to THIS lie on the telephone answering machine. I wrote to them asking them to "prove" their 1999 claim. In the end, the artist admitted that MY image was used because it was so beautiful blah blah blah ad it was soooo long ago. More lies. For the record, the violations occurred in a February 2007 piece, offered and sold as a "Painting A Day". And the other violation, my investigator told me , was committed in June 2006. The artist and business manager have been informed of the violations. The violations have been removed from the Internet and the website. Will there be more violations? I will wait to hear from my sources. The work is being watched. I feel badly for other artists whose work maybe violated here and who are not luck as I am to have found out. Bad, bad J. V. you should be embarrassed and ashamed of yourself.

Anyway, let's end this on a happy note. From the posted image you see here, I have a passage from the Green clothesline painting I am working on. (Hands off J.V. it's copyrighted material 2007). And I like it.