John Currin: The Dogwood Thieves

A painter's account of failure held in public: thirty-nine destroyed states of one canvas that John Currin worked, scraped back and overpainted across six years.

Published by A.S.A.P. in 2012, the clothbound book grows out of a lecture Currin gave at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in August 2010 and keeps that talk's conversational register. Forty colour reproductions follow the painting from its first prompt — a photograph in a magazine advertisement — through iteration after iteration, none previously published and none still extant, since each version was buried under the next. The result is closer to a working diary than a monograph: an artist known for finish showing the accumulated wrong turns underneath it.

Currin (b. Boulder, Colorado, 1962) has built a career on the friction between old-master technique and deliberately awkward contemporary subject matter, from the yearbook-derived portraits of 1989 through the middle-aged women, the elongated nudes and the later explicit paintings. His tone here is characteristically self-deflating: he offers the book partly to show what a painting costs to make, and partly to discourage anyone from spending six years on one.