And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
YOU EVER JUST GET IMMERSED INTO THOSE NEVER ENDING SOCIAL MEDIA RABBIT HOLES? Can't sleep because your sleeping schedule is erratic, almost non-existent, due to stress or whatever ails you, so you find yourself aimlessly browsing on Instagram, discover some sweet accounts, and then you stalk their Follow/Following lists? You're not paying attention to anything like time (at this point, it means nothing to me), and you get yourself deeper and deeper into that clusterfuck of a labyrinth, stumble across an interesting account, and then that account brings you into some weird wasteland of, "what the fuck?!," wondering, "how in the shit did I get here?," but, for whatever reason, you just keep going and going all while, "Once In A Lifetime," by The Talking Heads pops into your seriously sleep-deprived, fragile little mind?
No? Just me?
Okay...well, that happened this past weekend. I was looking for some people to follow for The Art Collective, and I don't know how the hell I found this one account, but I followed them because their work is...out there. Out of nowhere, I get some messages from this artist of just their artwork. Nothing else, no context etc., and I acknowledge their message and asked what the images were for. No answer.
I got another message, which prompted me to write this little piece.
I don't know what your intentions were for when you sent me your artwork with no context, but you got my attention. Maybe that's what you wanted?
Before starting this article, I did some looking around on their profile because I wanted to share this quirky excursion...
Soooooo...
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down Letting the days go by, water flowing underground Into the blue again, after the money's gone Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
7a.san2002 Profile Photo
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?" And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?" And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house?" And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
While looking through this account, something made me think this doesn't seem like it's a real thing, like the silence of this person not explaining anything to me, made me think that this is likely a fake account pretending to be the actual artist. Then I saw an image that made me want to get all Mulder & Scully on this. After looking at this image, I started to look through their followers and the people they follow. Then I saw this character, or account, called, "LeoVincible." After Googling the name, I discovered that LeoVincible is the name of the character created by the self-taught, horror surrealism artist, Adam Woodsmith, from Pennsylvania.
Screenshot taken from the real artist's ABOUT LEOVINCIBLE section from the official website
Oh great, I'm speaking to a fraud...
::que The Joker::
Same as it ever was
After two hours of digging around, I decided to reach out to Adam, and after confirmation, @7a.san2002 and a few others (that will be listed at the end of this blog to avoid contact and following) are one of the many fake accounts pretending to be Adam Woodsmith. Not only are these tons of Instagram accounts pretending to be Adam Woodsmith/LeoVincible, but they are creating a lot of other fake accounts pretending to be other artists, which was explained to me by Adam. I wanted to make a promise to Adam that I would make it publicly known that these accounts are doing that. I'm going to do some more digging around to see what the other accounts are, and whenever I come across them, I'll make a post about it.
Stuff like this really rubs me the wrong way, where artists are being stolen from. It further annoys the crap out of me more-so now being in the overly saturated technical world because no matter how many times you and others make reports about these people and accounts Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter do fuck-all about protecting the real artists. And on top of that suck-salad of bullshit, you get these fake accounts of women trying to sell pics or videos, and some sorry sack falls for it, and I get banned for 90 days & sent to Zuckfuck FB jail for posting a meme because it has a naughty word in it. Absolutely nothing gets done about these god damn accounts and pieces of shit ripping off the art community.
At one point where do we really draw the line and as a community become more forceful to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter putting an end to the real things that are literally violating their, "Community Standards?" It's rubbish.
Get it together!
And after all that fun stuff, I bought a piece of artwork from Adam's website. I'm not familiar with LeoVincible and what it is entirely, but because of all of this, I want to learn about it, and had to buy a cool piece of art that will legit look awesome framed and hung up in my weird creepy house.
What I would like to start doing now, because of this, is create a page of well-known fraudulent accounts pretending to be the artists they're ripping off. So, with that said, if you have any information of any Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media accounts that are doing this, please email me all of the information that you have, so that they can go into this section. I'm going to do further investigating to see what can really be done about this and hold these social media platforms accountable as well. It'll take awhile and a lot of hard work, but if we really want something to be done, then you need to act on it, and helping me out by any kind of information that you have will help guide me in the right direction.
You may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?" You may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right, am I wrong?" And you may say to yourself, "My God, what have I done?!"
The artwork is weird, creepy, and the stuff of which nightmares are made of; if the sleep paralysis demon, Night Hag, had an Instagram account, this would be it.
I like that shit - keep it up.
TO SHOW SUPPORT TO THE REAL ARTIST...
Follow their social media handles, subscribe to their mailing list/newsletter, buy their artwork, and make posts about them.
