John Currin

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.”

Evocative, varied, sometimes vulgar and often styled in a deliberately retrograde manner, John Currin's depictions of women nearly always induce a sense of the familiar, of having been seen before--framed on the wall of a doctor's office, spread-eagled in father's nudie magazine, glimpsed in a drawing by Rubin, posing as a prop in some old advertisement, lying supine in a painting at the Metropolitan. Whether working in watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil, or pen and ink, his sometimes lurid images of women, with their elongated necks, oversized bosoms and otherwise slightly distorted bodies, update the exaggerations of Italian mannerism with a breezy brushstroke or, alternately, a contemplative smudge of charcoal.