What Dave Castillo discovered about artist Rachel Dolezal

By Hook or By Crook's Dave Castillo has done some pretty impressive image detective work to expose artist Rachel Dolezal's direct copying of some movie posters for her artwork.

Here's a sample of Dave's expose - images and his thoughts from his website:

Movie Still from Pariah

 "Alike's World" "Painting" from Dolezal's blog ("Sold") 

 In my opinion "Alike's World" was likely printed onto a canvas from the photo and Dolezal then touched it up with clear acrylic gesso and paint. It is simply too accurate a copy. She regularly worked with acrylic glue (collage) back in 2012, so she would definitely know how to accomplish this. Much of her blog has to do with cutting things out of magazines. She took images that someone else provided,  glued it down and then called it "Mixed Media"

At first view, I tend to agree with Dave that this "painting" appears to be initially photo-based. That is, a digital image of the photo has been digitally printed onto a canvas and then "re-worked" with some clear acrylic medium (to give it a surface brushwork texture), and possibly some broader brushwork with a thicker medium with color-matching paint on the background buildings. The reproduction of the figure is too exact to be anything other than a reproduction on canvas.

The buildings have been worked over with a broader brushwork to blur them a little into the background, but the shadows (in most cases) are too exact in proportion and relation to the original photo to be anything other than a photo reproduction.

The sky has been worked over as well, and she went a little lazy on the left side of the painting. Five gets you ten that if I examined this painting up close, I would see thicker paint "covering" up the left side of the piece (above the shoulder of the figure) than on the figure itself. The fact that she didn't even bother to "change" some of the folds in the hoodie not only takes cojones, but artistic laziness in this, possibly the shortest fake route to a hyper realistinc painting.

There's now an interesting research challenge for some news organization to contact all the digital printing shops in the area where Dolezal lived at the time and see if she pops up as one of her customers; we may discover that a lot of Dolezal paintings have a similar substrate.

These are not paintings, they are "enhanced" appropriated photographs, which appear to violate copyrights, made up to look like hyper-realistic paintings... visit this link to see what a "real" Rachel Dolezal painting looks like...

Visit Dave's site here and see the rest of his evidence!

Update: Dolezal is selling her paintings - included those mentioned in Dave's piece, at this website: http://www.artpal.com/ - enter "Dolezal" in the search box to find them.