Untitled [seated nude draping her right leg over a chair arm] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated nude with ink on paper. It has a real sense of immediacy, doesn't it? You can almost feel him working through the pose, figuring it out as he goes. The lines are so spare, but they still give you a real sense of the figure. I mean, look at how he uses just a few flicks of the wrist to suggest the curve of the body, the drape of the leg, the fall of light. There is a palpable tension between the drawn line and the negative space. It’s all about the push and pull of the ink, how it both defines and implies the form. You can see this especially in the way he renders the chair legs, sometimes thickening the line for emphasis, other times letting it fade away. That kind of playful negotiation of line reminds me a lot of Matisse, who Diebenkorn clearly looked at. But where Matisse is all about decorative elegance, Diebenkorn's got this real rough-and-ready feel, like he's more interested in the messy, searching process of drawing itself.