Untitled [woman in glasses leaning back on her elbows] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a woman in glasses, leaning back on her elbows, with graphite on paper. The lines are searching, tentative, and wonderfully descriptive. There is a real sense of process here, as though we are looking over the artist's shoulder as he feels his way around the form. The materiality is so simple: graphite on paper. The paper itself has a toothy texture and the gray of the graphite sits on the surface. The artist uses line in a shorthand way to describe what he sees, almost like a map or a diagram. The glasses become dark pools, suggesting rather than describing form. Diebenkorn shares with Matisse an interest in the figure, often in a domestic setting. Both explore the relationship between line and form in intimate ways. With Diebenkorn, there is always a feeling of the provisional, a sense that nothing is ever really finished. Art is a conversation, not a pronouncement.