Berkeley #59 1956

Richard Diebenkorn made this large, square canvas – Berkeley #59 – with oil paint, and boy, does it show! I can imagine him layering those warm reds, yellows, greens, and blacks, scraping them back, layering again. The surface feels like a site of excavation and repair all at once. I keep wondering what he was thinking as he pushed and pulled the paint around. Did he have a specific landscape in mind? I love how the weight of the black areas anchors the composition, while the gestural marks create this sense of movement and fluidity. The eye jumps around. It's almost architectural, but then not at all. Diebenkorn, like so many painters, was clearly in conversation with other painters, like Matisse, Motherwell, de Kooning, all of them pushing paint around, trying to make sense of the world, one gesture at a time. And that’s the thing about painting, isn’t it? It’s this ongoing experiment, this messy, beautiful dialogue across time.