Untitled [seated female nude in high back armchair] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated nude with what looks like bold strokes of ink, maybe even with a house painting brush. I can picture him, standing up, moving around, really throwing the ink at the page to capture something about the figure in front of him. Look at how the marks gather and pool, especially around the chair. He seems to have gone back again and again to define the solidness of that chair with these really loaded, juicy marks. It's a sort of dance between description and pure, raw expression. You see Diebenkorn grappling with the weight of the human form, the weight of art history, maybe even the weight of his own expectations. I imagine he's in dialogue with other artists like Matisse, thinking about how to balance line and form, the abstract and the real. It's an ongoing conversation, this painting thing. We’re all just riffing off each other, trying to figure out how to make sense of the world, one brushstroke at a time.