Cheating or Creatively Rearranging?

I love to collage when I can.  It's so easy to do while sitting at my desk at school.

There is something so immediate, so tactile about slicing up color and repositioning, recreating, recontextualizing when I'm collaging.

In a way, I suppose I feel like I'm cheating a bit, using someone else's painting, image, photo...

But I had a great Art Teacher at Biola who said that we, as artists, never create, but we creatively rearrange.  I think this comes from Solomon's sentiment in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun.

And when I was an itty bitty artist, my mom used to comfort me in my frustration of having ideas copied by classmates by saying first that it was the greatest form of flattery.  But she also spoke of how there are no truly NEW ideas.  Everything that has ever been made has come from inspiration from something that has come before, even if we can't trace it back to the source.

So I feel a bit more comfortable "creating" collages with these words in mind.

Did you ever have your work copied?  How did it make you feel?  Do you feel comforted or disturbed by the thought that no art is ever truly unique?

Both of these collages (Night Hills flew off the shelf, but Swan Dive is still available) are up for sale for a steal of a price in my Etsy shop.  I also posted a print of this collage, as I got so much great feedback on the original.