Untitled [seated female nude on a short stool] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated nude using graphite on paper. Look at the marks he made, all these lines searching and finding the form, full of erasures and pentimenti. He’s feeling around for the figure, right? I get the sense of him, drawing over and over again, almost caressing the model with the graphite. I wonder what they were both thinking in that moment. I love how Diebenkorn captures the weight of the sitter, the way she's kind of slumped over in her seat. He’s really working out the relationship between the body and the space around it. The figure is built up through many marks. There's this quiet but intense conversation happening on the paper. It makes me want to draw! Artists are always talking to each other, aren’t they?