Inspiration, Imitation or Rip Off?

There is a talented painter I met a couple months before I took off to Europe. His name is Jeff Lyons and his paintings are fun, colourful, and full of life. He is dedicated and has worked hard at developing his his style which has become quite distinctive. You can check out his work here: LyonsART (http://www.lyonsart.com/index.html)

Today on Facebook I saw a link to "Kimmi's Attic" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimmisattic/)
(Note: several of the images I found particularly interesting were removed shortly after I posted this entry. Imges no longer available include:"Dejanae", "ginny", "Rebecca", "Ling", "Shaye", "Blair", "Mona", "Eve", "Annie", and others.)

For the sake of comparison, here is one of Jeff's paintings "April" and one of Kimmi's "Raeanne", and here is Jeff's "Luna" and Kimmi's "Just Thinking".

It really bugged me, so I looked a little further. I found Kimmi's web site, where she says "Please pay special attention to gallery 3, this is my "Girl Friend Series" (http://www.kimmisattic.com/Gallery%203.html). Even the NAME is a taken from Jeff's work, and she is drawing special attention to this series of images over her other works. Maybe they are selling well? Kimmi says that she feels that "art speaks to a person's inner being in a way that words cannot convey." Funny, there are a few words that spring immediately to mind when I see Kimmi's "Girl Friend" paintings.

On her blog, Kimmi thanks everyone that left messages after her paintings were selected by "Minor'e Gallery" where she had a great time showing her paintings and meeting other artists and inspiring people. She goes on to mention that the Girl Friends paintings have been selected by "Prairie House Gallery" to be sold as prints.

Surely, this sort of thing happens all the time, right? Should Jeff Lyons just be flattered (and maybe he is, I've not spoken to him about this)? In my opinion Kimmi has crossed a line here. She is showing these paintings in galleries and is now selling prints, and to my eye, they are more than just similar to Jeff's work. I can't be sure when any individual painting was made, but it appears to me that she was painting in a colourful, folksy style, showing scenes of domestic life, when she suddenly went off on a tangent making rather thinly disguised versions of Jeff's paintings. Again, I'm not entirely sure of the order of events, but my guess is there was suddenly some buzz around her new paintings and it snowballed from there. It's hard to hide stuff out in the open on the world wide web though.

I wouldn't be making a fuss about any of this if Kimmi had simply stated that these works were her own versions of paintings by Jeff Lyons, or even that this series was inspired by Jeff Lyons (although I think that would be a stretching the concept of "inspired by"), some sort of acknowledgment. Instead there was the repeated assertion that her paintings were "100% original". I think that is a rather extravagant claim for any artist to make!

When I was a kid I used to trace art work from books and magazines. It helped me get a feel for how they were drawn. I even drew a comic strip in which all the characters were copied from other well known comic strips. It was fun. But I never tried to sell them or pretend that they were "100% original" (a claim Kimmi makes for her paintings on various blogs). I wanted to make my own characters and did. Even when they were just stick men it was more satisfying than copying work by other people.

As artists, we draw inspiration from all around us. Anything we see can get taken in and influence what we do later. Some times it can be unconscious and one unintentionally makes something that comes very close to another artist's work. There are famous examples of this (like George Harrison's song "My Sweet Lord") and much less famous examples. I'm thinking of a piece of animation I made several years ago called "SeXXXy Doll". When I wrote it (with help from my friend Jeff Kenney) and animated it, it all seemed like an original creation. It wasn't until two years after it was finished that I watched a collection of animated shorts from the NFB and realized that I had come way too close for comfort to a short called "George and Rosemary" by Alison Snowden and David Fine. Of course I had seen their animation many years before I made mine, but never consciously thought of it while making "SeXXXy Doll". It would be a pretty stupid thing to try to do on purpose as "George and Rosemary" is widely known. I'll never forget how I felt while watching it and realizing how heavily I had drawn from it. The influences were so strong and obvious. I felt sick about it! I find it hard to watch either mine or theirs now.

Surely there is a line beyond which influence and inspiration becomes out right rip off. Has Kimmi crossed that line? It can happen once, sure, but repeatedly, with works by the same artist? I know what I think and I'd be interested in knowing what others think.

She still has a gallery at ebsqart.com (http://www.ebsqart.com/Artists/cmd_21007_profile_portfolio.htm),
and an Ebay page (http://stores.shop.ebay.com/KIMMIs-Attic__W0QQ_armrsZ1),
and a boundlessgallery page (http://kimmisattic.boundlessgallery.com/profile/index.html).

UPDATE:
Just a few minutes after posting this, Kimmi's blog was changed so it can only be viewed by invitation. Several paintings were also removed from her Flickr page.
Of course, you can still view some of it with the handy cached version
(http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:eGfqx90FihkJ:kimmisattic.blogspot.com/) .