Untitled [female nude backlit from right] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this nude drawing with ink on paper sometime in his career. Look at how the dark ink almost seems to dance across the page, creating this figure with a kind of raw energy. It's like watching a thought take shape. There's a real physicality to the drawing, isn't there? The ink isn’t precious, it's smeared and scratched. The lines are confident, but they don’t fuss over details. Take a look at the way he renders the figure’s torso, with those broad, almost brutal strokes. They give a sense of volume and weight, but also of transience. The ink defines the body but also seems to dissolve it back into the white of the page. Diebenkorn was obsessed with line, you can see it echoed in his later abstract paintings. His works, like this, remind us that art is a process of constant searching, of never quite arriving but always moving forward.