Untitled [standing female nude turning toward viewer] 1955 - 1967

This drawing of a standing female nude was made by Richard Diebenkorn. It's a flurry of graphite marks; a network of lines coming together to describe a figure, but it's more than just description, you know? I imagine Diebenkorn circling the model, or maybe he was fixed in place, but his hand—it's definitely moving, darting, searching for the right curve, the right angle. You can see the erasures, the ghost lines, the way he's feeling out the form. It's like he’s building the figure from the inside out, not just tracing the surface. The figure's pose, that hand behind her head, it's so casual, so human. And the stripes beneath her, maybe a blanket, add this little touch of domesticity, grounding the figure in a real space. It reminds me of his later abstract paintings, where he’s still chasing that same sense of space and light, but with pure color and line. It's all connected, this search for something real, something felt.