Untitled [detail of a man's head] [verso] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a man’s head, we don't know when, with pencil on paper. It’s a study, maybe an underdrawing, a sketch, with only the head drawn in firm dark lines. I love to think of what Diebenkorn might have been considering when he made it. What was he thinking? What was he looking at? It’s interesting how this guy’s head appears to be emerging out of the ground like a strange, but somewhat familiar flower. Those scratchy blue lines give it a ghostly quality. I like that it's not ‘finished’. It’s like he’s working out the geometry of this face. But it also kind of doesn’t matter, because it's a feeling as much as it is a picture, right? That dark line trailing from the mouth - is that a nervous tic? A tool? Like Cy Twombly, Diebenkorn embraced ambiguity, leaving space for us to bring our own interpretation to the work. It reminds me that every mark we make is a record of our looking, our thinking, our feeling, and our being.