knockoffs

This is my black cat print, est. Oct 2010.

I came up with the black cat print when I was a sophomore at Parsons, so it really should have died with all the other terrible work I was doing then. It also isn't very representative of what my style has become. But, it was the first thing I put online that caught the attention of bloggers, which lead to customers and then real clients. Looking back at my "career" (er, the year and a half I've been out of school) I credit all my success with this image. I still sell products printed with it, and so much of my work, cat-related and otherwise, is derived from it. It was the first pattern I ever made! And so, I feel really protective over it, and it was a big blow as many individuals and companies began to copy it. Many were very poor imitations on Etsy, or DIYs on fashion blogs, but a handful, like the examples below, were larger manufacturers.

Top row, Pepaloves Spring 2013; bottom row, H&M Summer 2013, dress for sale here

Some of these make me more upset than others. The H&M cat print is the most different from mine, and is likely more inspired by the trend than my exact work. I'm mostly bothered that I may have contributed to the manufacturing of thousands and thousands of cheap polyester items. It also makes me sad that the BeckSöndergaard and Joyfolie lines below are carried at Anthropologie, a client I really respect and love working with, and who first released a big run of black cat dresses in Summer 2012.

Top row, BeckSöndergaard Fall 2013, tote here and scarf here; bottom row, Joyfolie Spring 2013

I learned a very sad, very expensive lesson from all of this: anyone can steal your work and there isn't really anything you can do. I had a licensing lawyer send a couple cease-and-desists, but they don't do anything. The companies know you're too small to actually sue them, and they'll just put you off until you give up. Public shaming seems to be the best action.

In the end I try not to think about it. My work is a very small dot in the world, and images, trends, and products cycle at such a fast pace. I'm just going to keep making new work, and at least I can tax deduct all the lawyer's fees.

Update: Here is a brand new one by Dear Creatures, Holiday 2013. The shape is a little different and it's knit, but let's be real.

Oh Comley

I'm very happy to be a part of issue 11 of one of my favorite magazines, Oh Comley. Big thank you to Laura Callaghan who was willing to listen to me babble about myself on Skype!

Saturday morning inspiration

This is what I'm looking at while I drink my Oslo coffee and eat my Oslo bran muffin and get ready to paint some canvas to make tote bags today. The first one was an experiment and these ones should be epic.


Clockwise: Eley Kishimoto, google images, 2 ancient Egyptian paintings, Ashkahn, Becca Stadtlander, and last one unknown sorry!


Clockwise: 2 by Brie Harrison, Kaye Blegvad, Malin Gabriella Nordin, Yelena Bryenskova, Louis Bourgeois, Rodarte for Repetto, and Arian Behzadi.

Probably all of these have been on my tumblr where I post a few times a day and Diwa posts a few times a year.

There is so much to look at. I have so much to make! My summer starts in less than one month and it's going to be all seeing and thinking and making things all day and California sun.

"If blindness belongs to old age, it also belongs to infancy. We cannot remember seeing as infants, and so in a sense we all began blind and remained that way for several years. How did I see as an infant, and what did I see? One of the reasons I cannot answer those questions is that memory is necessary for vision. Everything from the first few years of my life is lost to me, partly because I was not old enough to remember seeing, to think of seeing while it was happening. In the most elementary way, seeing and memory go together, and the blindness of my infancy was a time when sight and memory were not yet linked. . . This infantile blindness is not physical blindness, but it is more than just a metaphor. If I have no visual memory whatsoever from those first few years, in what sense was I not blind?"
From The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing by James Elkins.

Seeing, interpreting, drawing, remembering. What do you see and what kind of line does it turn into and what does it mean much later? I've had sketchbooks since the middle of high school that link drawings to the most specific memories. A drawing of a cup of tea--one of dozens--may mean it was 5 pm on New Year's Eve in 2006 with Ryan Larry at Pannikin and it was raining.