Someone is ready to splash out serious cash for an “original hand painting” by unemployed nightwatchman George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is auctioning his painting on eBay.com to raise cash to pay off his mounting debts. With one day left in the auction, the bidding has reached $100,099.99. But a sharp-eyed New York mag writer says the waving image in Zimmerman’s painting was stolen from a popular Internet stock image.
NY Mag writer Joe Coscarelli wrote: “The patriotic work appears to be copied directly, if not ripped off completely, from a generic stock image.”
An anonymous Wonkette reader went a step further by overlaying Zimmerman’s painting over the stock image to compare the similarities in the two images.
A NYMag.com reader suggested Zimmerman “appropriated” the original stock image just as Andy Warhol and other artists have done.
But in his own words on the eBay auction page, Zimmerman wrote:
“The paint was donated to me by a great friend (J.S.), as far as I know it is regular household latex paint. I know its not the fanciest, but it is what we had and I needed to put these visions onto the blank canvas as soon as possible.”
“Blank canvas” implies that Zimmerman started his painting from scratch — which means he did not use the stock image as inspiration.
No one should be surprised at this latest revelation. Zimmerman is a known pathological liar.
