Untitled [standing nude resting her elbow on her knee] 1955 - 1967

This is an ink drawing by Richard Diebenkorn. The paper is bare, almost tan, and the looping black lines barely contain the figure. It must have been so immediate, like the model just walked in and he started. I love how Diebenkorn is thinking about the old masters but also thinking about Matisse. I bet he’s thinking about how to collapse it all, to get it all down at once, so it’s raw and searching. I can imagine him thinking about the flatness of the page, so he lays down some lines that are barely describing the figure. It feels like he is only just suggesting mass and volume. That line that defines the shoulder… it curves back in on itself, kind of nervously, I wonder if he was thinking about how to resolve the arm, if he ever got to it, or whether the drawing would remain in this beautifully open state. It's a conversation—a fleeting idea caught on paper, resonating with the past and sparking new dialogues.