Untitled [abstraction] [verso] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this abstract watercolor on paper, with no date attached. It looks to me like a landscape or maybe a figure, something dissolving into color and light. The materiality of watercolor—how it blooms and bleeds on the page—feels really present here. Diebenkorn isn’t trying to control it too much, but instead letting the paint do its thing. Look at how the blue and purple wash at the top bleeds into the black, creating these hazy, atmospheric effects. This kind of transparency and layering gives the work its depth, even though it's totally flat. In a way it's a diagram of seeing, the way colors pool and run together creating new colours in front of us. Diebenkorn was fascinated by the way abstraction could still hold a sense of place or feeling. You see it in his later Ocean Park series too, where grids and blocks of color evoke the California landscape. It reminds me of Arthur Dove as well, especially how both artists embrace ambiguity, inviting us to bring our own experiences and interpretations to the work.