Untitled [female nude seated on a stool drinking] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a nude, seated woman drinking, with what looks like a piece of charcoal. You can see where he's built the figure up with these scratchy, broken lines, almost feeling his way around the form, adjusting and readjusting. I can imagine him circling the model, rapidly sketching, trying to capture a sense of her weight, the slump of her shoulders. He’s not trying to give us some idealized version of the body. No, this is about seeing, really seeing, the person in front of you. Look at how the lines vary in thickness and pressure, conveying a feeling, not just describing a shape. Diebenkorn was deeply engaged with the history of painting, and with artists like Matisse. You can see that legacy here, but filtered through his own sensibility. Artists are always in conversation, you know, building on what came before, pushing in new directions. And it’s never a straight line. It’s more like a messy, beautiful, ongoing experiment.