Untitled [standing female nude reaching down with her right hand] 1958

This is Richard Diebenkorn’s nude, made with charcoal on paper, and it’s all about the process. You can see the artist feeling his way around the figure. It's like he's thinking aloud with the charcoal, trying to nail down the weight and volume. I love how Diebenkorn leaves in all those searching lines, those ghost-like traces of where he's been. It’s not about perfect representation, it’s about the act of seeing, of trying to capture something fleeting. Look at how he renders the leg which is closest to us: how the dark shading bleeds into the surrounding paper, blurring the edges and creating a sense of depth. It feels raw, immediate. This piece reminds me of work by Willem de Kooning, who also embraced a kind of messy, unresolved energy in his drawings and paintings. For both artists, it's the struggle to capture the figure, rather than the finished product, that really matters. It’s a conversation between the artist, the model, and the medium, and we’re lucky enough to eavesdrop.