Girl and Three Coffee Cups 1957

Richard Diebenkorn created “Girl and Three Coffee Cups” with oil on canvas, and you can almost feel his presence as he worked on this scene. The canvas is dominated by these strong, confident strokes and a palette of blues, greens, and earthy tones. You can imagine Diebenkorn layering the paint, finding the composition through trial and error, pushing and pulling the image into existence. I love how he captures the quiet intimacy of this moment – the girl absorbed in pouring coffee, the steam rising from the cups. You can imagine Diebenkorn thinking about Cezanne as he painted this, with his interest in domestic scenes. It's like he's saying, "How can I bring that kind of attention to form and colour into my own time and place?" That one stroke of white paint describing the edge of the table, for example—it's so simple, but it holds everything together! It's a reminder that painting is a conversation across time, where artists are constantly building upon and responding to the ideas of those who came before.