Well, January 4th the lawyer for the landlord apparently escorted Water Lily's owner out, for non-payment of January 1st rent...
To boot, all goods were going to be sold & the monies were going to be divied up between sales tax, the landlord & other creditors...
My 4 oil paintings (24 x36) were still on the wall...On consignment...But how to get them out?
Well, the key to proving the art was really still mine was those security tags. I had ordered them from a
website FineArtRegistry.com & when they had arrived in the mail, I had dutifully stuck one on the back of each work, photographed the paintings front & back, & uploaded that to the Fine Art registry website...
I also had taken a minute before bringing them to Water Lily to make a note of my plans, in the description section of the webpage...
So...When the lawyer for the landlord said what proof do you have that those paintings are your etc. etc., I sent a link in an email to the web page which showed those 4 paintings, descriptions, size, medium, style, & details of the show & where & when...
Not only that, the inventor of those security tags was able to vouch for me that I had uploaded all of this information just before December 1st, so the timeline was correct.
Even more powerful, was when the lawyer got to be difficult, I listed those paintings as "Stolen" which is a special button you can activate- seeing as the way I saw it, they had my paintings, knew they were mine & didn't want to give them back...To me that meant "stolen"...
Teri Franks, of FAR (Fine Art Registry) told Mr. lawyer , in no uncertain terms, that if he attempted to sell my paintings they would come up as stolen to the international fine art community...
No title, no-one would buy them or could ever sell them...
Powerful stuff...
Anyways, I am writing this because I am so grateful to FAR for all of their hard work in getting my paintings back...
I did get them back on Wednesday February 24th- took me about a month of hard fighting...But we won...
I said to Teri, how can I ever thank you? She said, tell people... So, I am telling people...
Teri is going to court March 15, in Michigan, to fight a very big gallery who has been selling fakes & forgeries & other bad stuff, & they sued FAR for publishing that truth...
If anyone is in Michigan round that time you are welcome to support FAR by showing up to the trial or hearing or whatever they call it...More can be read on the FAR website...(fineartregistry.com)
Sari Grove
p.s. sorry this sounds kind of like an ad- it is really the truth, it's just coming out a bit corny I don't know why...?
p.p.s. Today I brought a painting to show a brand new gallery called Lane Gallery, so maybe they will take me...We'll see...(They really liked the story about the security tags though, smart & cool & tech, & a great way to follow where your work ends up-the ownership transfer thing is a neat way to track provenance, plus you can get COAs (certificates of authenticity) just for marketing support...
