I put together a board with 9 prints for this man's wife, then later just made a collage of the 9 images. I was concerned about the reaction I would get for several reasons. One, the 3 paintings on the top row were done by different artists, and the 6 in the lower 2 rows were self-portraits. As art, I had an impression that the artists of the top row were (subconsciously perhaps) painting someone else and using this man (lower 6 images) as the model for their visions.

The second issue was whether I would get a bad reaction for the edits I made to these images of the original art, since I felt that the photos I had made didn't quite fit together aesthetically. So I did a few slight rotations, croppings, color and contrast adjustments etc., until I could paste up all 9 without having any one image/painting commanding much more attention that any of the rest, more or less.

Just found this post. An interesting dilemma to which I think you probaly found the key: changing bits by virtue of artistic licence creates its own work of art, just as long as there is neither plagiarism nor unauthorised direct copying going down!

As this was some time ago, what sort of reaction did you actually get?

Rob C