Untitled [seated nude holding her knee and shin] 1955 - 1967

This untitled ink drawing of a seated nude by Richard Diebenkorn, is all about the push and pull of dark and light. Imagine him there with his brush, wet with ink, coaxing the figure out of the whiteness of the page. I wonder what he was thinking about as he made it. Maybe he was trying to capture something fleeting, like a memory. I see the way the ink pools and bleeds, creating these almost accidental shadows. That pooling gives the drawing weight, a sense of gravity. Look how the dark strokes define the curve of her back, and the way the light catches her knee. It’s like he's not just drawing a body, but also drawing the light around it. Diebenkorn was always playing with the figure and the ground, the abstract and the real, kind of like Matisse, another master he probably looked at. For me, it’s this conversation across time, between artists, that keeps things interesting. It’s about taking what came before and pushing it somewhere new, accepting the mess and uncertainty of it all.