Urbana #2 (The Archer) 1953

Richard Diebenkorn made 'Urbana #2 (The Archer)' with oil on canvas. Look at this palette, it's like a conversation between earthy greens and cool blues, punctuated by bold black strokes and little hits of red that just zing! It's all about the materiality here. You can almost feel the thickness of the paint, troweled on in layers, scraped back, and built up again. See how those lines aren’t just outlines, they’re like structural supports holding the whole composition together? And that saturated blue rectangle, it's like a window or maybe a pool of water, grounding the more abstract shapes. There's a real physicality to this piece, it feels like Diebenkorn was wrestling with the paint, pushing it around until it yielded something new. It reminds me a little of what Guston was doing, finding figuration through abstraction. Ultimately, it’s not about knowing what it is, but about feeling something.