Untitled [standing female nude with hands over face] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this standing nude with charcoal on paper, and it's all about the process, right? I mean, look at how he's working. There's this beautiful, almost awkward, tension between the starkness of the black charcoal and the untouched white of the paper, it’s like a stage. There's so much physicality in each mark, you can almost feel him smudging and layering. Notice the face, obscured by hands, it's this mess of strokes that somehow suggests both hiding and revealing. It's a really gestural work, the charcoal is thick in some places and almost transparent in others. You can imagine him attacking the paper with these bold marks, and in other areas, being delicate, maybe using his fingers to soften the edges. It's as though he is working his way towards an image he can see, but that the viewer can only glimpse. I think of artists like De Kooning, or maybe even Guston, who were also exploring the figure with this kind of raw, expressive energy. It’s all part of this ongoing conversation about how we see and represent the world. And ultimately, it's up to us to make sense of it.