A.M. Homes has a hard-to-classify story on VanityFair.com. Written in the first person, for no apparent reason, it briefly retails some snippets from her visit to Currin’s loft. All of this is occasioned by his exhibitions in Montreal and the Netherlands and a new book of his paintings which is published by Rizzoli. This, according to Homes, constitutes Currin’s “living the dream.”

The dream, however, seems to involve growing up and losing one’s sense of humor:

What caused his humor to go? “Kids,” he says definitively. “When you have children, you’re thrust back into that feeling of being in church or at a funeral and thinking, What if I burped right now? All the funny things that come into my head are basically offensive to everyone around me and inappropriate and extreme. It was crucial for me to really become a man and stop being just a balding adolescent.”

The shift into a darker state of mind is evident as Currin goes into layered digressions on the works of his artistic heroes—he’s fixated on a Poussin painting he recently saw, “a crucifixion so complex, dense without being overworked. . . . I would like to make a painting as serious as that and give up some of my habits of joke-making.”

VF Portrait: John Currin (Vanity Fair)