ABOVE is a painting by George Bellows titled “The Village on the Hill” (1917). Bellows was a member of the “Ash Can” school of painters, a group of American artists in the early 1900’s who were known for depicting poverty and the gritty realities of urban life. “The Village on the Hill” is gorgeous to my eyes, and also surprising, because the only work by Bellows that I knew previously were paintings of boxers duking it out before screaming crowds.

I’ve been wondering how I can talk about different kinds of art, and reference them on this blog, without violating intellectual property laws. (Or really, violating something else — the unspoken agreement that we ought to respect the rights of authorship that adhere to the creation of something beautiful.) Carrie thinks that this issue is pretty cut-and-dry: there are copyright laws, and you follow them. Me, I’m trying to build my understanding of right and wrong from the ground up, hoping to arrive at a principle that I believe is justified. My principle might accord fairly well with conventional thinking on usage of art works, but it might not. I’m still working on it.

PROBABLY a good first step would be to learn a bit more about the ground that has already been covered on this issue. Believe it or not, it just hasn’t come up much in my life before, so I’m pretty much in the dark.

THIS blog isn’t a serious critical or scholarly journal; it’s just me, talking about things I like. So I’m not sure I can compare myself to an art historian, and justify the use of others’ works on that basis. I’m not neccessarily interested in writing something illuminating about art in every case. Sometimes I just want to adorn my world with pretty things. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. (I might even venture to say that it’s a good thing to appreciate art, and to want to spread the word about people who have done great work.)

IT’s a subject I should return to later — for instance, when I know more about it. But for now, I’ve stumbled upon something cool: the Wikimedia Commons, a repository of images and other files that are in the public domain. Thanks to the people at WC for the image above.