Little One reacted large, adamant that it was an original idea, but I was mean and insistent because the theme - a lone girl seeing a single large bird in a big city - was indeed one that I knew I'd seen HK artist Carrie Chau tackle many times in the past.
The little one was horrifed at any hint of plagarism, went on-line to find a Carrie Chau painting along those same lines and couldn't, so challenged me to indeed find a Carrie Chau painting that worked that same theme.
Well, that's the backstory to the hideously embarrassing incident yesterday at Page One Bookshop.
What happened was that, by a curious coincidence, I passed a large coffee table book called "Work in Progress" on the paintings Carrie Chau did for the exhibition of the same name ... and that's when I remembered exactly where I'd seen the Carrie Chau paintings that worked Little One's theme: that she did literally dozens of the suckers for her exhibition "Work in Progress": an entire exhibition of nearly 40 paintings of Girls Seeing Birds in the City.
The book was horrifically expensive and I certainly wasn't going to pay that much just to prove a point ...
... so I snuck it into a dark corner and began to photograph pages ...
... AND I GOT CAUGHT!!!
Cringe! Shudder! And more cringing!!! More shuddering!
Anyway, great big embarrassing trouble so I told them what it was about, and the lovely manager totally understood and let me keep a single photograph:
... although I was very naughty and kept a second:
... although I obviously didn't keep the right photos because none of them are actually of Lone Girls and Large Cities, although you can see the Large Bird and you can see how, obviously, paintings with that exact theme would have been among them.
So, Little One, there you go! Only three of the about 40 examples of how Carrie Chau worked around your same theme! The things I do for you!
And the indignities I suffer! Oh, la!
Actually, to be honest, it's more like "the indignities I suffer just to say 'told you so!'"
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1 comment:
Well *cough* let me tell you the real reason why I wanted the link to the image. Part of the assignment was that we had to write a section on our 'mentors' or influences, and since she had done a similar thing I thought it would be easy to write up about it and compare the two, etc. In the end I did a section on artists who had similar compositions (girl and monster) and what they were trying to say with those images
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