Someone stole my art and I don’t know how to feel

Here is a weird thing that happened. One night, a close friend who I've known since I was 13 and lives in the UK, sent me a message -
"Hey, didn't you do a painting in high school called 'My Sweet Old Et Cetera?'"
Yes, yes I did.
What made him ask about a painting I did almost 40 years ago?

He sent me a link to an auction site of a company in St. John's. It turns out his brother, who lives in St. John's, often forages estate sales looking for interesting things and saw my name on two items. A painting and a drawing, both by me, created in high school, now in a lot that included pieces by renowned Newfoundland artists such as Scott Goudie, Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt and David Blackwood. The last time I had been home, I looked at them, was embarrassed by them, and asked my brother to dispose of them. Bundled in a box along with other items, my brother threw them in a dumpster, that was locked to prevent illegal dumping.

It turns out, someone (most likely an employee from the waste management company) had retrieved them and brought them to be sold at auction. I received none of the proceeds, but it definitely stirred up some odd feelings. Outrage? A little bit. Pride? An even smaller bit. Embarrassment. Definitely. Mostly it made me confused as to how it happened at all or even how I feel about a stranger paying a few bucks to have my work in their home.

Let me be clear on one thing - I made those pieces both for personal reasons and as explorations of my self, in the most teen way possible. Like, "bad poetry" teen-age ways. They are maps of a teenager trying to define himself in the most angsty, teen-agey way possible. Let's consider ourselves lucky that I couldn't play an instrument, and didn’t record some terrible music. Both pieces, oddly, were about our maternal grandfather and as I write this I can honestly say I was too stupid to see the connection before.

The painting was named after an E.E. Cummings poem, well know to fans of the film Hannah and Her Sisters. I recall it was superficially like a letter to a loved one. Cummings was an ambulance driver in the Great War in Europe, similar to my mother's father who was part of the infantry that used horses, yes, horses, to move the big guns in the same war. I tried to imagine a scene where a soldier, in the middle of wartime horrors, was thinking of his loved ones in their parlour, living their quiet lives, and in turn, thinking of him. It was more like a magazine illustration than an interpretive painting. Also, the perspective was poor as was the strange use of acrylics used in both watercolour and impasto style techniques (while a fun aspect of acrylic paint is that flexibility, there was no mastery of either technique used in this painting). I used a formal portrait photo of my grandfather in his uniform as a reference and everything else was imagined (including an anachronistic grenade unlike the style used in that war).

The second drawing is an even more basic allegorical illustration of myself holding a rotary dial telephone, standing in a literal "forest of emotions" wherein each tree is given a face depicting a different emotion. Whew. It was, if I remember correctly, me trying to capture that sort of dark feeling you get when you answer the phone and immediately know that it is bad news. That was a memory of the day when my grandfather died, and my mother, who along with one of my brothers had travelled to England to be with her father in his last days. There you have it, my grandfather, memories and conflicting emotions. An adjudicator once wrote about a different painting, that it was trying to be too many things; a fantasy, surreal, illustrative, allegorical, and yet realistic all that the same time. In other words, I didn't know what I was doing, which, I did not. At some point I abandoned painting entirely. I think it was my failings at the art, the metier, the craft of it, to depict anything other than what was before me, and it seemed far more difficult than simply drawing something with a pen. What I've learned about myself and my abilities in forty years of not doing it too much, is this: I'm more comfortable drawing than painting, I learn far more by pushing myself in small nudges than trying something beyond my abilities and sometimes, well, most times, you can depict a scene, a time, a place, and even people, and just let the moment speak for itself without drawing a map to the viewer. I tried too hard to try to capture complex ideas like a tacky, over worked political cartoon rather than really focussing on a moment or a simple idea and letting the viewer decide for themselves what they get from it. I think this explains why I didn’t have space in my life for some stuff I did as a teen. It wasn’t small enough to put in a shoebox in the back of a closet and it wouldn’t be on my walls so I thought I should just let go of the nostalgia and sentimentality and get rid of them.

Artists have always had their work stolen or copied or sold without their permission. Currently we've made such theft systematic, by training Machine Learning Models on what art is. A.I. training represents some idea that personal expression and ownership is secondary to progress. I know that my sketches that I posted on Instagram are now part of the grist in the mill of a blind, insatiable machine and there's little I can do to stop it, which is why I’ve stopped posting until I figure out what to do next.

It’s one thing to find out from the Internet that your work was stolen from a dumpster but it’s another thing to have it stolen from the Internet to be added to a dumpster. In the end, I can say I have sold two works in some esteemed company. At least, I hope, the people who paid a couple of hundred dollars for work that I was too embarrassed to keep, get something out of it and may even forgive a teen-age artist for his youthful, trivial attempt at something profound. From hence forth I will attempt to keep my profundity humble, modest and mostly hidden out of dumpsters or public auctions.