The Dogwood Thieves collects 39 lost iterations of a single painting American painter John Currin worked on from 2004 to 2010. Starting from a magazine ad, the painting mutated through night skies turned to oceans, a Russian bra emerging from bare breasts, and his wife’s face swapped with an 80s newscaster and then a 70s Danish porn star. It documents the obsessive process of making a painting, and how Currin handles his broad range of cultural references across photorealist kitsch, Renaissance drapery, magazine photography, and personal fixations. Paired with text from a 2010 lecture, the book is, in Currin’s words, “partly just to show kind of what I go through to make a painting” and “also to dispel any notion that it’s a good thing to work on a painting for six years.”