Blue Club 1981

Richard Diebenkorn made this print, "Blue Club," and I love how he builds a world using simple shapes and colors, a way of seeing that feels both familiar and totally new. There's something about the texture here. It isn't just flat. You get the sense of layers, like the ghost of decisions made and remade. Notice the big spade shape, off-white, almost crumbling, and then those assertive blue blobs sitting right on top. The surface feels worked, like he’s digging into the image. I see the ghost of a grid in there; maybe he used that to set up the image? That raw simplicity reminds me a bit of Guston, especially his later work. The way he wasn’t afraid to let things be awkward, to let the process show. Diebenkorn, like Guston, embraces a kind of searching, where the final image is less about perfection and more about the journey of getting there. Art isn't about answers, it's about the questions.