Friday, June 15, 2012

Musical Images used for Art Licensing

©Susanne Clark - Cubist Play
Acrylic on canvas - 30 x 36 in 
Cubist Play, above, is being used for the 2012 - 2013 program cover for the Virenze Concerts which take place at the beautiful classical 14th century Castle Rijckholt, near Maastricht in the Netherlands.  This is the second year my work has been chosen as the cover art for their season program and I am excited about it.

Over the past few years I have had lots of requests from all over the world to use images of my musical paintings for a variety of uses.  Most are required to promote music events like concerts, or for CD covers but one was also used as a holiday greeting card for the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera Company in the UK and another as the cover for a cello society cookbook.  It's great fun for me to see my work used this way and I now have quite a collection of pieces which a friend suggested I put together and publish in book form. This will be a nice way to keep it all together and there are some great ways to self publish using products like Blurb or Vistaprint.

The right to use images of work from the web is not really understood. People think they can use anything but that isn't the case and most images are under copyright as are mine.  Early on one of my pieces, Cello Babe, was incorporated into the poster above.  It won a competition to be used for an annual school musical concert in Australia and was designed by an art student at the school.  After the posters were all printed the teacher somehow found out that part of my work had been used in the poster without my permission and he, knowing about copyright, was horrified and emailed me straight away to see if it was ok to go ahead and still use them.  Of course I agreed but I was impressed that he had the courtesy to email me.

This poster is from back in 2006. Cello Babe was one of my first musical works and has been requested quite a few times as has Jazzy Cello which has been used as a cover on several CDs as well as posters.  The "Musical Series" came about as the result of a request by my son. He is a musician and had just completed recording a CD with a producer he was impressed with. He wanted to give him a gift in thanks, so he asked me to create a painting with a musical theme.  I enjoyed doing it so much that I did several more and the series was created.

In my next post I will show how Cubist Play was used on the new Virenze Concert brochure and the use of my work for the Artist Series in Tallahassee, Florida.

4 comments:

Eva said...

It is hard to see someone copy our work. It has gone on since artists started painting. With today's technology one has to accept the fact if you are going to post your images online they WILL be copied! You have to decide if it is worth it to you. I have sold a lot of work because it was seen online and I know that my images have been copied.I don't let it stop me .
Now with Pinterest and Polyvore providing a clipping tool, it will make it possible for your images to appear everywhere. Fortunately these sites link the captures back to their source.It can work in your favor.

Deborah Younglao, Silk Painter said...

Congrats Suzanne! It's great that you have work that fits a particular niche like that. And yes, a book would be a wonderful idea.

Susanne said...

Yes I agree Eva that it happens all the time. I keep the resolution of the images on my site fairly low so that they can't be reproduced in a very large way from that. I know too that my work gets used a lot without getting my permission so it is nice when I get asked. For posters and brochures a high resolution file is needed so people who want to use them for that have to contact me.

Susanne said...

I guess niche work does have a lot going for it Deborah. I have a friend who has made several books of her art and they look great. She made them for her children. I just thought that one for my "used" work would keep it all together and be a nice record.

Related Posts with Thumbnails