Untitled [study of legs and dress] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this study with pencil, figuring out legs and a dress. It's mostly cool grays and blacks, very linear, and a little ghostly. I feel for Diebenkorn trying to get this just right—revising the line of the dress, thinking about the fall of the cloth, and the angle of the legs. It’s not about perfection. It’s about the feeling of the thing. The dress is given real attention, with dense, scribbly lines. You can see the process of finding the form, the way one line influences another, and how the material creates a kind of record of thought. It reminds me of other artists, like Giacometti, who were interested in a kind of existential mark-making. You can really see it in the dress, which almost vibrates on the page! Ultimately, it's this ongoing, open-ended conversation between artists across time that keeps the whole thing alive. Each mark invites more marks, and the conversation goes on.