Untitled [nude leaning back and resting her elbows on a chair arm] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing with charcoal, maybe while sitting in the same room as his model, or from memory, or a bit of both. The way he's used charcoal, you can almost see the energy of his hand moving across the paper. I can imagine Diebenkorn making this and thinking about what it means to capture a figure with just a few lines. The texture of the charcoal gives it this cool, almost gritty feel. There's a rawness to the marks, especially around the chair and the model’s hair, that feels so immediate and real. It reminds me of some of his paintings where he's trying to find the essence of a space or a form with as little as possible. It’s like he’s having a conversation not just with the model, but with artists like Matisse, constantly thinking about how to see and represent the world around him. It is a way of keeping painting alive, like a big, ongoing experiment.