Untitled [female nude in stockings seated on a striped cushion] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this intriguing ink drawing of a female nude on a striped cushion, and what strikes me is the way he’s feeling his way through the form. Look at how the ink sits on the page. There's a real sensitivity to the wetness of the medium, those darker blacks against the watery grays. It's like he’s not just drawing what he sees but also documenting the movement of the ink itself, almost like a dance. Check out the cushion and how the lines that indicate its form seem to dissolve into abstraction. It’s a push-pull between representation and pure mark-making. You know, it kind of reminds me of the way Joan Mitchell would approach a landscape—finding that edge where the subject almost disappears into the gesture. Art is so cool like that, it's an endless conversation across time.