Painting II 1949

Richard Diebenkorn made Painting II with oil on canvas. Looking at the brushstrokes, I'm imagining him, layering and scraping, building up this surface over time, with all these false starts and corrections. The palette is muted, dominated by earth tones and grays with sudden punctuations of yellow and red. The large dark shape is cool like the depth of a cave, a heavy presence. I'm curious, did Diebenkorn apply the paint thinly, allowing the texture of the canvas to peek through? Or did he trowel it on thick, creating a tactile surface? See the way that orange kind of dissolves into grey? It gives the painting a weathered feel like a landscape. I see a conversation between abstraction and representation, a dance between the observed world and the artist's inner vision. Diebenkorn worked through intuition, and was responding to something in his life as well as the history of painting. It makes me think about other painters like de Kooning who were also pushing the boundaries of abstraction. There is no true end point, just an ongoing experimentation.