Steal like an artist

https://youtu.be/oww7oB9rjgw

I have started reading the book steal like an artist by Austin Kleon and also watched his TED talk which can be seen using the link above. Austin discusses the idea of originality, the fact that nothing really is that original. Ideas are either a development or progression of another idea, or connections made between things that already exist but have just never been put together.
The thought of stealing someone else's work seems cheap, who wants to be a thief? However I have realised that many times over the years I have done this without even thinking. Trying to create an image for illustration, an action for animation, whatever it may be we all use references. But the idea is to find the best ones to use as reference. This is a manner of stealing, but only an idea! The piece we make ourselves is new, its an adaptation of all the things we have taken from ideas, poses, compositions, colours or styles, thus making it original in its new form.
With this in mind I set off to carry out a robbery in the National Gallery in Edinburgh after the picture hooks talk I had attended. I only had a few hours, not enough time for sketching as I wanted to try and get around the whole gallery. The aim was to take not of as many pieces as possible, but not just any, only the ones that really inspired me. The ones I thought were worth stealing from, each may have different elements that interest me, some might only have a small part of the whole that I believe I could use somehow. This technique of stealing makes sense, you will only steal stuff that you think is really good, why would you even think of stealing a rubbish idea? This is something I have noticed through my recent research, Maclise seems to have stolen poses from the Raft of Medusa in his creation of the Waterloo Cartoon, Shaun Tan has reference works by Tom Roberts to which he describes it as paying homage by creating his own version in the book The Arrival. This is something I have discussed in my concept development document and shown through the resemblance of Antony Gormley's sculpture Bed to Carl Andrea's Sculpture Bricks. The images that were stolen on Saturday are shown below, time will tell what makes it through into my own work.