untitled [standing female nude with arms raised] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this standing nude drawing with ink on paper, but when, exactly? Who knows? What I see are these bold, confident lines capturing a figure in motion, arms reaching up like she’s about to dive into something unknown. I wonder what Diebenkorn was thinking, what was going through his mind as he made these marks. I can imagine him standing there, quickly, intuitively trying to get something down. The lines are so energetic, almost vibrating off the page. You can feel the pressure of his hand, the speed of his wrist. There's a tension between the sparseness of the lines and the fullness of the form; he’s showing us how much can be said with so little. It’s like he’s asking, “How can I capture the essence of this figure, the energy of this moment, with just a few strokes?”