WHAT DEFINES ORIGINAL ART
Main North Road – Blair Athol. Imperfect but entirely original.
What Defines Original Art (Blog by Mike Barr)
‘In layman’s language, any painting that has been crafted by hand is an original. That thought may hold up for a while until we consider the many forgeries of master works that are produced for gain.
Of course we would not call any of these forgeries an original – but clever and illegal copies of expensive works. Putting it plainly, they are fakes.
Indeed, they may be the products of an amazing technician and meticulously copied with the brush, but they are what they are – a fraud.
The word original, when it comes to painting, obviously means more than just something that has been hand-painted.
With great numbers of painters in the world today and universal reach of the internet, it’s almost inevitable that copying-fraud takes place – and it does.
It started for me in the early 2000s when I started off on eBay. One day I got an enquiry from a prospective customer as to whether my painting was the original or the exact same one offered by an overseas seller! It turned out that some one had stolen my complete listing and was offering my work for sale – and they didn’t even have the painting. Their business model was to steal artist’s online listing – sell it – then paint a copy of it! Luckily for me eBay took the imposter down.
Some very well know artists have found out quite by chance that others have copied their paintings almost exactly and these fraudsters are quite happy to claim ownership by placing their signature on it! Eventually they get called out – sometimes they get sued.
What I call ‘soft art fraud’ can begin in workshops where students paintings almost always take on the character and colour of the tutors painting. This is an acceptable learning practice of course and always has been, but it is still abused by students who put works done in the workshop and enter them into shows as their own original work – which of course it isn’t! Also, some students never get passed the stage painting only like the tutor – and this becomes a real problem later on.
The unethical practice of copying others and claiming it is our original work is widespread and has become ‘that which cannot be mentioned’! I can almost guarantee that in any art competition/exhibition of mixed art there will be quite a number instances of soft fraud. Unfortunately, sometimes these bogus works actually win ‘best in shows’.
Every art judge and every art buyer should be armed with a smartphone and with tineye.com. You can take a photo of any painting and paste it into the search box and every instance of it on the internet will come up. Sometimes it apparent that the artist has not just used a photo as a reference but exactly copied every last detail and in most cases have traced the image.
It’s such an ugly thing to claim originality when we know there is nothing original about our work. Even some professional painters rely on exact copies of other peoples images to succeed because they are not capable of producing original art themselves, they are not artists but technicians that can copy.
Be original - paint original – buy original.
Happy painting’
- Mike Barr