Untitled [three studies from life] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this 'Untitled [three studies from life]' with pencil, and you can almost feel the scratch of the graphite on paper. Look at those lines—hesitant, searching, like he’s feeling his way around the form. I imagine Diebenkorn sitting there, squinting at his model, trying to capture not just what he sees, but what he feels. The pose—the way the model’s head rests on their arms—it's heavy with a kind of quiet introspection. It reminds me of Matisse or even some of those Renaissance drawings, where the line is everything, where it's all about the essence of the form. There’s this wonderful tension between precision and ambiguity, a willingness to leave things unresolved, and it’s these gaps and absences that really draw you in, inviting you to complete the picture. It's like Diebenkorn is in conversation with all the artists that came before him, riffing on their ideas, pushing the boundaries of representation. He’s in the mix!