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    John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves

    John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves


    $40.00

    • Format: Hardcover
    • 88 pages
    • Publisher: A.S.A.P.
    • Published: June 2012
    • ISBN-10: 0979764254
    • ISBN-13: 9780979764257

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    Description
    In 2004, John Currin (born 1962) began a large-scale painting that would eventually be titled 'The Dogwood Thieves.' What ensued was six years of humorous missteps, uncomfortable second-guesses and painterly 'faux pas,' all visually presented here in 39 previously unreproduced and no longer extant iterations of a single painting. 'John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves' is an entertaining portrait of the sometimes agonizing artistic process, and follows the artist's initial inspiration from the photograph of a magazine advertisement to what would become dozens of paintings atop paintings. Currin shows how he went about changing night skies into ocean horizons, how a Russian bra evolved upon a pair of bare breasts and why his wife's face underwent a lengthy transformation and traded features with a 1980s newscaster and then a 1970s Danish porn star. It also displays the delicate balancing act Currin maintains more generally in his work as he maneuvers between a broad range of cultural references, from women's magazine photography and photorealist kitsch to Renaissance oil painting drapery and personal narrative. Combining visual documentation with a lecture Currin gave at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in 2010, this book is, as the artist puts it, 'partly just to show kind of what I go through to make a painting,' but 'also to dispel any notion that it's a good thing to work on a painting for six years.'
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