Piet Mondrian with a Black and White Dog

I got the idea of using a Piet Mondrian painting as the starting point for one of my hand pulled serigraphs. The painting I chose to work with is a Piet Mondrian composition with red blue and yellow, (he created a lot of paintings like that). Unfortunately, because of distance, I was not able to travel to a museum to see one of his paintings in person. However by using books that I owned, and by going through everything my local library could get through interlibrary loan, and checking the internet, I did manage to see quite a lot of Piet Mondrian’s paintings. I was rather surprised to discover that there seemed to be a texture to his paintings, although because I was looking at photographs, I am not sure whether he put it there, if it was a quality of the photographs, or if it was simply a matter of the paint cracking over time. I had originally planned to put full detail into the dog, but when I pulled the first black stencil, the stark black and white dog worked as the simplicity of the background slowly evolved with subsequent stencils, and I added very little else to the dog.