Still Life: Cigarette Butts and Glasses 1967

This is Richard Diebenkorn’s Still Life with Cigarette Butts and Glasses, made using charcoal and wash on paper. I can almost feel him at work, shifting things around, a flurry of activity frozen in monochrome. The act of painting itself becomes a site of inquiry, where the ordinary transforms into something extraordinary. Diebenkorn, he’s feeling his way through the composition, smudging and layering to find the forms. I wonder if he was chain-smoking at the time and what he was thinking while he made it. There’s something vulnerable about the way he captures the glasses, like a portrait of his own gaze. You can almost feel the texture of the paper, the give and take between the charcoal and the surface. That dark wash pools and flows, creating depth and shadow. His work feels like a conversation with artists of the past, reinterpreting the still life through a modern lens. It’s like he’s saying, let’s embrace the uncertainty, let’s see what happens when we leave room for multiple readings.