roxeterawr answered:
I didn’t ‘steal’ anything. No one did. Someone called Karla linked me to an amazing piece of artwork of me and my wife. I didn’t see the watermark at the bottom, it’s tiny and not bold and not hard to miss. I assumed Karla was the artist and thanked her on my Instagram. Karla never said she was the artist, or lead me to believe that in any way, so she wasn’t ‘lying’ or ‘stealing’ art, in fact, she was the reason I saw it and instagrammed it in the first place, I wouldn’t have even known it existed if it wasn’t for her. When the original artist emailed me saying I’d made a mistake and that SHE was the artist, I immediately changed the description on Insta and credited the correct person. No one ‘stole’ anything.
What I’m most concerned about is the fact that for some unfathomable reason, some people, instead of politely pointing out a mistake and asking me to correct it (like the original artist Harteus did), decided to hurl abuse at me. People have been writing disgusting things to me, it’s like a witch hunt. Have all of you forgotten that any person in the world is capable of making a mistake?There doesn’t have to be any malicious intent, and you don’t have to spout abuse to get things to change. All Harteus did was just tell me she was the original artist and it got changed immediately.
Everyone who has sent me ugly, nasty messages because of an honest mistake needs to walk up to the mirror and take a good, long, hard look at themselves.There are better ways of going about things. How are you going to cope in the real world? If there is a mistake made at work? Are you going to get all your friends to all send abusive, disgusting messages? Frankly I’m embarrassed at the way people have been behaving.
I know what it’s like to have work genuinely stolen, I spend hours making youtube videos only for people to download them online and re-upload them and make money off content they have put zero work into. I understand the severity of this, the impact it has on the original creator, how disheartening it is. Obviously I would never intentionally do the same. I also appreciate the beauty of art, go to art museums, I’ve been tweeting about the fact that in the UK, the subject ‘History of Art’ is being abandoned by our curriculum because Michael Gove sees it as a ‘soft’ subject, and I’m outraged. My wife and I sit down and draw together to relax.
But I literally can’t believe what a bunch of condescending pricks you’ve all been, and how you’ve all been throwing around words like ‘thief’ and ‘stealing’. That’s absolutely fucking disgusting to label anyone those words without knowing the entire facts. Grow up.
the-real-skye
