Ocean Park #30 1970

Richard Diebenkorn made Ocean Park #30 with oil on canvas, and what I see here is all about how forms emerge through the act of painting itself. He’s laying down color and line, building up the composition, and allowing the history of that process to remain visible. There's a tension here between flatness and depth. He's playing with the architecture of space, but the paint is pretty thin, almost transparent in places, and you can see the ghost of earlier marks and decisions. That long diagonal line of pale blue slicing through the center – it's not quite a solid form, but more like a suggestion, a fleeting glimpse of a structure that may or may not be there. It makes me think of a half-remembered dream, or a landscape seen through a haze. This openness to ambiguity and change is something that Diebenkorn shares with artists like Agnes Martin, who also used a subtle touch to create paintings that invite contemplation and multiple interpretations.