Untitled [seated female nude with left leg tucked under] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated female nude with a graphite pencil on paper, but when? You know, I can feel the artist figuring things out as he goes – searching for the right line to describe the form. It’s like he’s feeling his way around the space, trying to capture the essence of the figure with as few strokes as possible. What was she thinking as she held that pose? You can see Diebenkorn wrestling with the pose. Those thin lines, they’re like whispers, just barely there, but they hold so much information. He did a lot of these kinds of drawings and he really was trying to synthesize Matisse and abstraction at the same time. His "Ocean Park" series has that same kind of sparse searching quality to it. Like he was never happy to just fill everything in. It's like he wanted to leave space for other people’s imagination. It's a quiet kind of looking.