The anatomy of appropriation 

I find my images and make art...  from other people's images and art.  

In other words ..... appropriation. This is a long and hallowed tradition which has exploded in this age of the digital.  You no longer need to go to a museum, etc. and draw your copy of an old master.  One click and it's yours... reduced to bits and bytes.  A problem with all this is copyright, who controls (and can make money) from an image or an idea.  

More on this in later posts:

My method (really the rules I impose on myself) is to always try to transform the base image into something that is substantially my own... either thru cropping, inverting/altering color, collage, or distortion.   Here is a visual example of appropriation in action, both mine and others.

First:  Ed Rucha's Standard Station pulled from google this day.

Rucha

Here the artist, Vik Muniz, has appropriated the Rucha and rendered it using car parts/metal rather than paint.


 My take on the Muniz work.  What pulled my interest from the image above is the diagonal line of the building and the rust as a sunset sky.  Cropped and sharpened, saturated.  It appeals to me as an image of emptiness ... or at least the non specific/curious relationship between foreground and background.  No building looks like this, no sky like this.  If something is happening in a narrative sense, it's happening elsewhere.
It does what I want it to (or hope it does for others) of making you look twice... as it can't immediately be read or seen as a thing ... in and of itself.  something is missing or hidden or unexplained.  Surreal.

Taken one step further as a base for a collaged image.  Here the siren's head floats above the diagonal.  The rust is obscured but the tonal quality of the face matches and complements the image below it.  Does it work completely...not sure.  It's no longer empty but what does it say?  Whatever it is ... is ambiguous at best