Untitled [profile of a woman on telephone] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing, *Untitled [profile of a woman on telephone]*, with charcoal on paper. Look at how Diebenkorn lays down those marks. He’s feeling around, trying to find the form of the figure. There’s something so vulnerable about a drawing, right? You can see all the artist’s decisions, the pentimenti, the shifting lines as he searches for what he wants to say. I bet he was listening in on someone's conversation while sketching. The woman’s face is both present and absent. I wonder what he was thinking about as he shaded and smudged the charcoal, and what he was feeling. There is a real tenderness in the way he renders the soft curves of her face. The diagonal lines filling the bottom of the page are very reminiscent of his later paintings. Painters are always learning from each other, riffing on each other’s ideas and methods. This drawing resonates with the work of other artists like Giacometti and de Kooning, who also explored the human figure in fragmented, expressive ways. It’s an ongoing conversation, a dialogue across time.