It's Memory, Not Plagiarism

Recently, I was discussing how two artists might independently produce very similar paintings, with neither one copying the other. It suddenly occurred to me that this very thing had happened to me. Early in my career as a psychologist, I worked with the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), which involves children telling stories to certain pictures. For decades I never even thought about that test, but recently I noticed that two of my old paintings look like TAT pictures! The images must have lodged somewhere in my memory, and one day they emerged again as I painted.This is TAT Card 4, if memory serves, a fraught picture of a man and a woman, drawn many decades ago:

Here is a digital drawing I made in 2014 from an image that seemed to just come into my mind. You can see that it is the same composition, only with the positions of the man and woman reversed. The men's hair even has that curl, his eyes and facial expression are similar, the woman's hand is similar, etc. Obviously, the memory of this image stuck somewhere in my brain, and one day it felt like it simply occurred to me.

Here is Card 7 (I think it's 7) from the TAT, followed by the painting that again FELT like it was inspired by an image that simply came into my mind:

My painting from 2008 is an abstraction of the TAT image, and again the figures are reversed in their positions, but the feeling about the relationship between the two is similar. It's interesting how memory can work, and it's interesting that I only recently recognized the similarities between my paintings and the TAT drawings, probably triggered by the discussion of how artists might paint very similar paintings without intending to do so.