DERIVATIVES TOO

Not Again

So let's talk some more about derivatives.

Yes, again. Derivatives are important to most artists because they are used in so many disciplines. We talked about using a photo as the basis of your painting, now let's head out into deeper waters, Collage and Photo Montage.

A collage:

A collage (From the French: coller, to glue, French pronunciation: [kɔ.laːʒ]) is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.

Photo Montage:

Photomontage is the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs.

Okay, so a collage is an assemblage of different forms creating a new whole .This means you take bits and pieces of unrelated things and using nothing but your scissors and mind you glue together this wonderful new thing!

That's a great and fantastic idea. Take a bunch of junk and make it something worthwhile. So where do you get your junk? Everywhere. You can pick up bits and pieces of string, seaweed, macaroni, old magazines, paint, matchbooks and other grunge and that's the heart of your work.

So where does this lead back to derivatives? The photo part and maybe the bits of other things like Trademarked beverage signs or logos on the matchbooks. All of that belongs to someone else.

Oh no, now you want me to track down all of the copyright holders and Trademark rights and get permission. The long answer is no. No I don't and here's why, you don't have to. The holders of a copyright or Trademark do have certain rights and one of them is not to be indiscriminately and recklessly copied. But they don't have a right to keep you from exercising your creative expression, within limits.

Making a collage is bits and pieces, remember? That's why you can do it. You aren't taking the whole image and copying it and claiming it as your own. Okay, maybe matchbook images get copied completely, but that's not the usual rule. In a collage most of the bits are less than a complete whole. And that's where the derivative exception comes in, you aren't making an exact copy or claiming that it is the same as the original image. It's something new and different which uses a piece of the other work.

I spent a very pleasant day at Shore Acres. The foliage is wonderful and lends itself to all sorts of things, like being squished and fractured in a photo editing program. Now me, I like flowers pretty much the way the were designed by Nature, but in some cases I think they can be altered without offending whatever creator you think did the original art work.

So I did just that and I like what came out and I can now take the image and plant it smack in the middle of a collage because it isn't the same as the original and it isn't the whole. (Okay, it could be but for the purposes of this lecture it isn't.



If I had on the other hand wanted to make a photomontage (Okay it is a photomontage cause I did it in a photo editing program, but the technique is mostly the same. Don't be so picky it's just for illustration anyway), I could have done something like this. Sure it's still a Harley and there's a guy out there who owns it and loves it and might want a say about how I use it. And he could claim that it was a likeness without documented release. He could say that and if there was a very conservative judge he might get a hearing, but the truth is the original picture is now a collection of pictures assembled into a new whole using completely different and unrelated pictures to create an image which looks much like that white Harley dresser. Its an assemblage and that makes it a new and completely separate work of art. It's a derivative.



I am not suggesting you neglect your obligation to secure a release to use the materials you want to make your new creation with but you can sometimes do things without a paper trail a mile and a half long.

Always live up to your responsibilities, if it were your work you'd want the artist considering using it in their piece to be respectful and exercise due diligence, and they should. But not every piece requires an unshakeable provenance.