{"product_id":"9780979764257","title":"John Currin: the Dogwood Thieves","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 \u003ci\u003efaux pas\u003c\/i\u003e, all visually presented here in 39 previously unreproduced and no longer extant iterations of a single painting. \u003ci\u003eJohn Currin: The Dogwood Thieves\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"","brand":"A.S.A.P.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47008709148912,"sku":"9780979764257","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780979764257_p0.jpg?v=1763885626","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780979764257","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}