This is another topic that comes up periodically - mostly under the topic heading "derivative." Then there are the words stealing, appropriating, copying, and -- gasp -- counterfeit, that crop up in some of these on-line conversations about art quilts.
Sigh...blah blah blah blah- it just goes on and on: people accusing other people of copying someone else's style or worrying that they will be accused of same, just because they once took a class with someone and are using that person's method of construction or techinque of cutting. It makes me tired. Why are we so hung up on that word "derivative"?? Is this an art quilt obsession?? Is it because we are relatively new to making ART that we drive ourselves nuts about this stuff?.
There have always been artists who painted the same things in the same style at the same time because they were all experimenting with a new way of seeing. You would be hard put to tell the difference between work by X and Y. And even Z's work got into the act. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now.
Ditto music: Beethoven's 6th has phrases in it that could easily have been written by Mendelssohn. Can you always tell the difference between Mozart and Hayden? And Leonard Bernstein was clearly influenced by Aaron Copland and Gershwin -- you can HEAR it. So what? It is still Bernstein's music.
There are a million examples of this in every type of art.
I did start out with synchronicity, didn't I? Yes, it happens - more than we think. Many of us have experienced making work and then seeing a piece from clear across the planet that is strikingly similar in subject or even style, although neither of you could possibly have seen each other's work because they were being done at the same time and you didn't know each other, to boot. There are two other artists whose work I relate to - and saw the first time with the shock of recognition because we both use one particular element in our work. We developed separately, as did our work - and we did not know each other. Parallel lines of interest and thought.
I like to call it "family resemblance." Here are two pieces done by two artists who live 3000 miles from one another and who had never met. This is my piece, X-Post Facto.
It was truly with the shock of recognition that I saw Karen Rips' piece, "Exhale" and somehow knew that we were kindred spirits.
I had made mine a year or so before she made hers; hers was part of a series but mine was the only one I ever made like that, before or since. Either one of us could have made both pieces. SYCHRONICITY:
it happens. Embrace it.
A possible idea for an exhibit. Anybody want to curate a Synchronicity show?
