This Image is Copyrighted ©
This image is copyrighted, to me. It's called "Her Welcome to Him"© It started out in Indian Red, Raw Umber, and Hooker's Green. This is the third version of the painting, and it measures about 38 x 42"
I have two stories about copyrights, one depressing and one uplifting. This is to follow up to yesterday's "This Image Is Copyrighted ©" and in the comments I'll show you what yesterday's painting looks like today.
Somewhere in Ulm, Germany:
I only once got in trouble about copyrights. I sent a show of paintings to Germany, and included a poster to advertise the show. I never got my originals for the poster back, and had to write the fellow a stern letter cautioning him that I owned the image and he had no right to keep it or reproduce it for profit. I never got my image back, and would not be surprised if the image showed up in reproduction around Ulm Germany in 1998.
To reclaim the original I would have had to take an international flight. I would have had to hire an attorney. I would have had to do a lot of things I just was not able to do.
I was ripping mad about this thing. The image was most marketable, and two years later was reproduced in a magazine. Losing control over an image that you have created is a terrible thing.... it feels like a personal invasion, a very personal injury. I was in pieces over this.
Now eight years later I have wised up. I could have better protected myself in 1998, and could have spared myself alot of grief, suffering, and nervous exhaustion. But jeez I wish I had that original today!!
Meanwhile, in Dublin:
At the time I was going back and forth with the rip-off artist in Germany, I had to go to Dublin on business. On the way to the Four Courts to deliver some papers I found myself short of an envelope in which to deliver them.
By chance I passed by the Unicef office, and I ducked in. Looking around, I found the only envelope suitably large came with an 8 x 10 card... a reproduction of an Henri Matisse painting of flowers in a vase. It was a really old card and so lovely I bought three.
When I turned it over I discovered something really wonderful. It said Henri Matisse, Flowers in a Vase, 1917, in the National Museum of Copenhagen, © Unicef 1952. Matisse's original painting had been sold, but Matisse retained the copyrights, and in 1952 had turned those copyrights over to Unicef.
Between 1950 and the 1970s, accomplished artists were invited to create artwork specifically for reproduction by UNICEF as greeting cards. Raoul Dufy’s watercolor painting of the United Nations building in New York City was the first, followed by works by Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and others.
So that card that I was looking at had been earning money for Unicef for 50 years. The great old master Matisse had taught me another trick. By using the copyrights I retained on works I had sold I turned this trick during several of my shows, and by the end of the year I had earned $1,500 for Medicins Sans Frontieres.
That's a nice story.