Ocean Park #30 1970

Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #30 is a large oil on canvas, and just looking at it, I can feel the paint being pushed around. The composition is built from these big, somewhat geometric shapes. Look at how the pink flirts with the black and the way those greens just sit there, like an open field. Then there's that central, blue section; it’s like a window, or maybe it’s a feeling, suspended. I wonder what Diebenkorn was thinking, what he was chasing, as he made this? You can see he’s wrestling with something, scraping back, layering up. It reminds me of Guston, maybe Motherwell, too – that search for something true, without having to depict it, just feeling it out through color and form. Artists talk to each other through their paintings, don’t they? It’s a conversation across time, a big, messy, beautiful dialogue that never really ends. And we get to listen in.