White Club 1981

Richard Diebenkorn made this etching, "White Club," sometime in the 20th century. Look at the network of lines, the tonality, the wiping, and the careful balance. The image hovers somewhere between a playing card symbol and an architect's elevation. I imagine Diebenkorn carefully building the image in layers, scraping back, re-biting the plate, each mark carrying its own history of decisions. I wonder if he felt like he was designing a building. A slight removal from observed reality. As an artist, you start with something and then make a series of choices. You put something down, then you take something away. Diebenkorn wasn’t alone in this kind of artistic quest. He was in dialogue with artists like Matisse and Motherwell, each exploring ways of making meaning through form and color. It's a conversation that continues, artists building on each other's insights across time. Painting becomes this embodied form of expression, open to multiple interpretations, where meaning is never quite fixed.