Wednesday, March 07, 2012

T. K. Ryan Confirms That Gallery On Baum's T. K. Ryan Drawing Wasn't Drawn By T. K. Ryan


The parade of Tony Greco's fraudulent cartoon art atrocities continues! Above is an item described on Gallery on Baum's ebay listing as an "Original Tumbleweeds & Hildegarde Hamhocker drawing by T.K. Ryan on medium card stock 6 3/4" x 7 1/4". Done in ink and marker. Highly detailed!"

This one is laughably easy to debunk, because Tumbleweeds creator T. K. Ryan, unlike most of the artists represented by forged drawings in GoB's collection, is still alive. So I emailed him:

Mr. Ryan:

I came across a drawing attributed to you offered by a seller on eBay who is known to sell a lot of fakes. Can you tell me if the following is your work? [link]

To which he graciously replied:

thanks, Peter...yeah, that's a fake...best wishes, TKRyan

To quote Tony Greco himself, "If one's a fake, they're all fake," so I'm going to go ahead and declare all the other godawful Tumbleweeds sketches he's sold to happy, positive-feedback-leaving customers (1 2 3, etc.) to be forgeries as well.

And no offense to Mr. Ryan, but selling Tumbleweeds forgeries? That's low.

Finally, it should be obvious by now that the "T. K. Ryan", the "Bill Hanna", and the "Bushmiller" drawings I've exposed here were all drawn by the same person.

(Note: I just added a "Gallery on Baum" topic tag so that it's easy to track this story on PSP. I'm not done yet!)

5 comments:

Toriko said...

I like the way all of the ebay listings seem to end right after you post about them.

Peteykins said...

Toriko, some of them already ended or were ending as I was writing about them.

Anonymous said...

Tumbleweeds! So missed.

Anonymous said...

Isn't this uh actually illegal or something? Can't someone call the cops on this guy for fraud or whatever?

Anonymous said...

Watch out, art forgers! There's a new Cop on the Art Beat! I'm smelling at least a feature documentary on this new passion of The Pony if not the holy grail of a reality series! Sure, it might take months to round up the perp, and there would be blind alleys and cold leads, but the inexorable march towards the final conflict would be thrilling… right up until the weasel breaks down and cries like a little girl. Then it would just turn pathetic. I'd bet you could even get matching funds from the Cartoon League For Justice to fund the production!