A few words to the "festival community" on buying online:

        After several days of going down an internet rabbit hole and sending cease and desist emails to websites for selling bootleg versions of our art, I'm left feeling more educated and grateful for our friends & companies that do business with integrity. I'm also a bit tired.
Currently, there seems to be a huge wave of drop-shipping Shopify sites slinging things like tapestries, posters, leggings, hats, etc, whose targeted demographic is the "higher consciousness" crowd (whatever the fuck that means, but you gather the gist). "Drop ship" means to send from the manufacturer directly to the consumer, without ever going through the hands of the storekeeper. So a site can be created and filled with products, and when an order is placed, it is sent to the buyer's address and a middle-man collects a small allowance on their posted product without ever seeing it.
One supplier for this type of game is the notorious Alibaba (or Aliexpress), a Chinese conglomerate with a truly staggering selection cheap inventory, with many of the items being unlicensed knock-offs. The process to have one's original content taken down from such a site is also, well, staggering.
The middle-men who create the storefront sites are from every walk of life and in every part of the world. I found one guy (assumedly making websites from the apartment in his parents' basement) who, while accommodating, rationalized selling bootlegs because it is "legal to sell this artwork, as we do not produce it." Yeah... no. It's not legal bro. 15 U.S. Code § 1114. Google that shit.
In our research we also came across "tapestryking.com" ...which, in an absurd way is kind of the king, I must admit. "They" also appear to run websites under "ravedream.com", "tapestryz.com", "50dollarshoes.com", "hunteroo.com", "rightsideamerica.com" (<- that one is fucking hysterical) "fyshing.com" and a few more. After sniffing around, the best we can tell is that it's a small Bangkok company, drop-shipping from China, which is (possibly) involving a couple ex-pats. Who knows? And who cares. It's too exhausting, too weird, and too unfulfilling to track that stuff down. What we suspect for dang sure is that being "a small group of EDM loving individuals from Chicago" who want to "inspire and uplift an entire generation of individuals", as their mission statement claims, is probably a stretch.
Then there are sites like Redbubble, and even the more reputable Etsy, Ebay, and Amazon, where we can find unlicensed artwork being pedalled on any given search. Here the individual user's store must be reported so the parent company (through a painfully lengthy process) will take action.
It's hard to be angry at people from China or Southeast Asia, or hell, even America or Canada, for this type of conduct. We're actually not angry about all this. While the world is getting smaller and uniting into one border-less human race every day, we are still in the very beginnings of that process. Many of the people who create this kind bootleg stuff live in a very different world than we do, my dear comfortable reader. It's no excuse for lying and stealing, but it is certainly a consideration toward compassionate understanding.
And unless you've lived life under a rock with your eyes closed and your ears plugged, you have a general background understanding that everything is a remix of a remix of a remix, and that we're all going to the same place in the end. Integrity is not something to be followed to the letter-of-the-law. Yet we know it when we see it.
Anyway, it is still disheartening to see copyright infringement, because we are working artists, and many of our dear friends are artists, and we see the grind and hustle that goes into producing a halfway decent blue-collar wage by making pretty stuff that people like. It's an immense amount of physical and emotional work to put something creative together and live on it. If you doubt me here, give it a try sometime. To have a careless or selfish third party skim their own unwelcome portion of profits from that kind of outpouring simply will not stand.
Exasperated, my initial strategy was to going to be to put these "companies" on blast, and even word things in such a way so that a loving fan might decide to harass them online. However, the best course of action perhaps is to offer a conscious consumer's heads-up:
* When you purchase art based products online, look for the artist's name in the item, or the text in the description below. When I license my imagery, often it will often be proudly advertised with "by Randal Roberts", rather than simply being called, "swirly flower person" or some other ambiguous title.
* Call the phone number on the website, or shoot them a message. If there is no answer, or if you receive a curt response in broken English, it might be an unauthorized organization.
* Illegitimate drop-shipping sites and pages have a "look" that becomes discernible when you are familiar with it. Are their prices ridiculously cheap? Does something just not feel right? If they are selling Chris Dyer's art next to posters of hockey players AND Marvel movie posters AND shower curtains, it might not be legit.
* If you like a piece of art, try to find out who the creator is. Often they will have a personal website or FB page. You can buy from them directly, sometimes at a discount if you get along nicely. This kind of grassroots support and connection is what we artists live for!
* You can always try tineye.com, the reverse-image searching site, to investigate an image's origin.
* See the companies below. And, THANK YOU for supporting art!! 
Lots of love 
TL;DR - Buy art and gear online from awesome, legit sites such as the ones below. They are all based in the States, good friends, and in our experience they strive for virtue and treat their creators like gold.
Vision Lab Art
https://visionlabart.com

Eye love you



When creating art, it is crucial to acknowledge where the darkest dark and lightest light are going to be. Synchronously, if the artist places them next to each other in their piece, it tends to be more compelling. When learning how to draw the human figure, we discover that the eye contains (nearly always) the darkest dark and the lightest light, in the pupil and the glint, respectively.

When we look into the eyes of a friend or lover or beloved pet, there is sometimes a kind of fear, or at least a deep and desperate sense of seeking, beneath our adoration in the recesses of our minds. Have you also noticed this? Our heart seems to sort of ask, "are you there god?" between quick glimpses and shared smiles. The eyes of a cherished companion seem like a feasible avenue for that inquiry. If not there, then where at all?

So there's an analogy here... and sort of an answer. Perhaps the eternity that awaits us is blackness and nothing more; the darkest black like the inside of the pupil. However, in this living moment, on the precipice of boundless dark, there is that darn spark of light. Perhaps they were placed next to each other by god the artist for fascinating effect. Or maybe our fevered poetic minds must inject meaning where there is none. But to be sure, inside the pupil is where all light and color is interpreted, and it's where you are.
<3
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)