Untitled [seated female nude dipping her head] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this seated nude with ink on paper. I can imagine him, brush loaded, quickly pulling the ink across the page, trying to capture the weight of the figure. He's probably thinking about Matisse, maybe even Picasso, and all those line drawings they did. It’s that quick, intuitive mark-making—the kind where you almost don't think, you just feel. Look at that thick, dark line that defines the back! It's so confident, so sure. Then, there are the lighter, more tentative strokes that suggest the form, the roundness of her shoulders, the dip of her head. It's like he's feeling his way around the figure, discovering it as he goes. The negative space is as important as the lines themselves, creating a sense of airiness. Diebenkorn, like other artists, is in dialogue with the past while forging his own path. For me, this kind of drawing is less about perfect representation and more about the process of seeing, feeling, and translating that into marks on a page.