Untitled [seated female nude resting her arms on her knee] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated nude, with her arms resting on her knee, using graphite on paper. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the page, searching for the form, correcting, and refining. I wonder what Diebenkorn was thinking as he drew this figure. Was he lost in observation, translating what he saw into line? Or was he also thinking about other artists who have depicted the human form—like Matisse, maybe? There’s a kind of vulnerability in this drawing, an intimacy that comes from the way the figure is hunched over, lost in thought, with the lines themselves so spare. That hatching around her head gives her thoughts weight, substance. For me, there is a connection between Diebenkorn's figurative work and his abstract paintings. Both explore space, line, and form, just in different ways. Artists are always in conversation, aren’t they, across time and styles? Each mark informs the next, and the dialogue continues.