the found piece of wood (found, painted, stolen?)

so the story is this... one day i decided that i needed some new material to paint on, so i went out behind our apartment to the nearest alley. most of the time it doesn't take too long to find good pieces of wood or other material to paint on and that proved true on this particular day. i quickly found a nice piece of what seems to be hardwood with rounded corners and some beautiful hinge marks. carried the piece to school and the following night i painted it with house paint, starting with a series of dots that made two dotted circles (made by using a piece of paper that i found that had a nice round hole punched in it as a kind of compass). next i applied a splash of blue paint, and finished it with a green grid. while working on some other paintings i let that one rest. there was still something missing, but i didn't know what. i ended up finding a small piece of canvas with the number two written on it and added it loosely to see if it might be the missing piece. after moving the 2 around i found the spot that it needed to be to finish the painting. i didn't have my glue so i kept it in my journal until a couple of class periods later then i attached it and it was good. i think it is the first thing that was really finished this semester.

i showed it in a critique. some people liked it and some weren't so sure. i put it back in the painting racks of the painting studio and continued working on all the other things i've been involved in.

about two weeks ago, one of the students who was in the critique (she liked the painting) came over to me in class and started asking me questions about the painting. did i still have it? did i keep it at school? yes and yes. i wondered if maybe she knew someone that wanted to see it or buy it or something. "the reason I am asking about it is that someone showed it in my collage class yesterday. I wanted to make sure that you didn't throw it away before I made any accusations" she said. i couldn't help but laugh! someone was showing my work as their own. i'm kind of giggling as i write this, it is so absurd. it turns out that the student who "borrowed" my painting for his midterm critique is a senior and he is in the same painting class as i am. the really crazy thing to me is that at SAIC i think that anyone could be in a painting class, write a poem on notebook paper, take that to a midterm critique and argue why the poem is a painting. with the right argument, that would pass at this school. somehow this guy thought it would be better to take my work as his own. i guess that the piece went over well in his critique (which is kind of flattering, and that he thought it nice enough to steal... ha ha) but now there is trouble knocking on his door. it is up to me at this point to decide whether the punishment that his collage teacher has assigned him is enough, or if i want to take it up a notch and get him kicked out of school.

that is my story and i'm sticking to it. i'll write more when there is more to write.