Paris, France

Mijn Schatje (aka Marie Blanco Hendrickx) is a young, highly successful artist with a distinctive style. I posted a few of her illustrations on this blog last month after she was listed in the Netdiver Powagirrrls* directory.

Today I received a very interesting e-mail entitled “Is Mijn Schatje an art thief?” from an anonymous source claiming that Mijn takes her archetypic doll faces (mostly Asian ball-jointed dolls, or BJDs) and other components of her work from photographs by other artists without permission and without giving credit to the original creators… the site offers numerous examples (with overlays demonstrating the appropriation process in a compelling manner) along with a variety of postings by and on behalf of “the people responsible for the sculpting, delicate painting, and painstaking photography of these labor-intensive creations.”

Homage? Appropriation? Certainly not coincidence…

*(I have just received a related post/link from Carole Guevin at Netdiver that opens a debate online; also a link to QBN where Mijn’s plagiarism is in hot discussion).

Montreal, Québec

Netdiver has always made a special effort to recognize the work of female creators. “There are so many talented women blazing trails in design, sometimes it’s easy to forget that women are still severely underrepresented in many areas of the industry,” writes Liz Wolfe in a new online piece, describing Netdiver’s Powagirrrls gallery which “helps target this inequity through its focus on ‘women who rock the design scene…with more than pink design!’” See more of Netdiver’s favorite female creators here. (At the  OFFF 2009 conference I attended in Portugal last week I was actually surprised to observe an almost equal split between male and female participants).

Images above: work by 25-year-old French illustrator/designer Mijn Schatje who “takes the conventions of wide-eyed doll art and elevates this genre to a whole new level of sophistication.”