Hey, so, I appareciate you taking art theft seriously. And I was very enthusiastic about this zine. But after reviewing the proof of the alleged art theft I realized it's just heavy referenced art, a bit of a far stretch to call it stolen art when it's just heavy referenced facial expressions. This coming from a zine literally based in the copy of famous artwork feels a bit hypocritical and I'm not sure I feel okay keeping on supporting your zine after that.
We recognize your concerns. It was difficult for us to approach these allegations, but when we overlaid the artist’s full zine piece on top of the original artwork, we found that in addition to tracing the faces, they had also retained the original background completely — specifically, they had simply drawn on top of a high-res version of the original painting instead of painting their own.
This is antithetical to the spirit of our zine, as we had fully believed all contributors would be using famous paintings as inspiration and reference in parodic fair use, not just painting their figures on top of the original artwork and tracing portions of the figures’ heads and faces from another artist’s works.
At this time we are concealing the names of the parties involved out of respect for the victim’s wishes. If you do not wish to continue supporting us, we completely understand, but we believe we were justified in pulling this artist’s pieces from our project.