Piet Mondrian and a Black and White Dog

I got the idea of using a Piet Mondrian painting as the inspirational starting point for one of my hand pulled serigraphs. The painting I chose to work with was a Piet Mondrian composition with red blue and yellow, (he created a lot of paintings like that). I had seen some in Museums years earlier, and I wanted to create a painting in the style of those vivid blocks of primary color.
Unfortunately, because of distance, I was not able to travel to a museum to see one of his paintings in person. I had to rely on memory and images. I looked through all of the Art History books that I owned, and then went through everything my local library could get through interlibrary loan, and finally checked the internet, (this was in 2005). In the end I did manage to see quite a lot of Piet Mondrian’s paintings. I was rather surprised to see that there seemed to be a texture to his paintings. That was not something I had specifically remembered. As I was looking at photographs, I was not sure whether he put the texture there, if the texture was a quality of the photographs because many of the books were quite old, or if it was simply a matter of the paint on Piet Mondrian’s paintings cracking over time. In the end I did add my own layers of texture to my serigraph. You have to look closely to see it, and that is how it was intended to be.
I had originally planned to put realistic details into the dog, but when I squeegeed the stencil for the black ink, the stark black and white dog worked surprisingly well against the bold primary colors. In the end I added very little else to the dog.