Untitled [standing female nude with raised right arm] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a standing female nude, with graphite on paper. The way he lets the lines trail off, the figure unfinished, gives it a real sense of process. I love that the arm that’s raised is almost dissolving into the background. It's like he's thinking through the form, not just copying what he sees. Look at how he shades the torso, those quick, hatched lines give the figure weight, a kind of groundedness, even though the drawing feels so light and airy overall. There’s something vulnerable about leaving the marks so visible, it’s like he's saying, “Here’s the work, the thinking, the searching.” This reminds me a little of Matisse’s line drawings – that same economy of line, that sense of capturing the essence of a form with the fewest possible marks. Diebenkorn wasn’t interested in perfection, he embraced the beauty of the imperfect, the tentative, the unresolved.