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." ( )

Some people would give this book 5 stars for showing the depiction of one painting over 6 years. For me, although a quick "read", the feelings of frustration and annoyance over the number of iterations it took to produce the final product was overwhelming. Can you imagine what the artist felt? On top of that, I really don't care for the finished painting at all. However, if I ever thought of becoming a painter, this little book would've changed my mind. ( )