Untitled [woman seated in a wicker chair] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a woman seated in a wicker chair using graphite on paper. It’s all tentative lines, searching for a form, a bit like when I start a painting! I imagine Diebenkorn circling around the figure, trying to capture the weight of her body in that chair. Notice how the marks around her face are more insistent, as if he’s especially interested in her gaze. But it’s the wicker chair that really gets me going! All those intersecting lines, a geometry that traps and releases the sitter all at once. It reminds me of Matisse's interiors, where the domestic becomes a kind of cage. Diebenkorn was always wrestling with representation and abstraction, and you can see that tension playing out here. It’s like he’s saying, "I see you, but I also see the lines that make you." And in seeing those lines, he’s also seeing all the painters who came before him, all of us just trying to figure out how to make sense of the world with marks on a surface.