Untitled [seated female nude resting her right arm on her leg] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated female nude with graphite on paper. The image is all about the tense relation between line and volume. Diebenkorn seems to have been searching around the form, feeling his way in the dark, almost, as he coaxes out a figure from a jumble of lines. He’s a bit like a sculptor carving away material to find the form within, right? I wonder what he was thinking about as he made this drawing? It reminds me of the work of other artists who were also obsessed with line and form, like Matisse, for example. Ultimately, drawing like this is about trying to understand something by looking really hard, and in the process, it is a conversation with all the other artists who have tried to do the same thing.