Untitled [female nude seated on model stand] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a female nude probably with ink or watercolor on paper. The washes are so fluid and transparent. I can imagine Diebenkorn being in the same room as the model. He looks up and then down, marking the page, responding, and then making choices. He is thinking about the relationship between space, figure, and ground, all in monochrome. It's just enough information, almost diagrammatic. It reminds me of an exercise I sometimes do, where you look at a thing, then quickly look away and try to paint what you just saw, relying on memory. Diebenkorn was so good at this kind of tonal rendering, a technique he also used in his abstract paintings. There’s a kinship between artists across time. We are all constantly eyeballing each other's work! I love to think that painting is a form of embodied expression that embraces uncertainty. It welcomes multiple interpretations rather than fixed readings.