Susan Larsen Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park Studo, Archives of American Art, December 15, 1987, 1966
[Tape 9, side A]
[Continuation of Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park Studio, December 15, 1987 Interviewer: Susan Larsen: RD: Richard Diebenkorn; SL: Susan Larsen]
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SL: [W]e're here in Santa Monica, in Richard Diebenkorn's studio, and it's a cold Southern California winter morning, and we are finishing the third--fourth? (chuckles)--session of our interview for the Archives of American Art. . . . When we left off, we finished around 1966, and you were still in Northern California?
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SL: Yes. And was it that spring or summer that you moved to Southern California?
RD: I would have moved for the beginning of the school year, so it would have been summer.
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RD: And I remember that specifically because we hadn't had a, we hadn't found a place to live when school started.
SL: And where was school--for the record?
RD: Oh, that was UCLA. And we came down and thought, well, it'll be a matter of three or four days, so we'll splurge and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then time went by and we weren't getting a house, and I could imagine the astronomical bill that was piling up, and then school started and I was teaching at UCLA and living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I thought was really incongruous.
SL: (laughs) Pretty classy.
RD: Yeah, yeah. But then finally we found a house to rent that we liked in the Santa Monica Canyon.
SL: Is it near where you live now?
RD: It's closer to the ocean. I'm not sure what. . . . I forget what street.
SL: Did you come because you were invited by UCLA to teach? . . .
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RD: No, no, it was. . . . Fred Wight had asked me for, oh, I guess it was about the third time that he had asked me to come down. . . .
SL: What was your image of the art world down here? And was that an attraction or was it the climate or the cultural. . . .
RD: Well, I think, just as the case now, I feel that I've been in one place too long, and things are wearing out for me a little bit, and I've. . . . Well, for now, I've been here twice as long as any other place. I think I was twelve years in Berkeley. Or, no, more than that. Lived in Berkeley from 1953 to '66. So, well, that's twelve, thirteen years. So we've been twenty-one years here.
SL: As of '87.
RD: Yeah. . . . I may have referred to the visit to Tamarind?
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RD: I had come down to do a stint at Tamarind in sixty. . . . It doesn't matter, but early sixties. And I had seen Los Angeles in the new, in a new light. And there was considerable vitality artistically, as we know, and the pace was pretty exciting to me. . . .
SL: By nothing, do they mean culturally or economically?
RD: Just a desert.
SL: Just nothing.
RD: Yeah.
SL: How many years were you at UCLA?
RD: I was there '66 to '73. Eight.
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SL: That's okay. So where did you set up your studio here in Santa Monica? It wasn't this building that we're sitting in.
RD: No, it's a building several blocks down, at Ashland and Main. It was an old brick building. . . . Well, I was of course looking for a studio, and I spoke to Sam Francis, and he said, well, he was moving out of his, and he wasn't quite sure when, but that I could have it when he does, on the second floor, to the rear, in this building at Ashland and Main, which is now jazzed up and refurbished, and. . . . It wasn't much then.
SL: Did you come here for the physical atmosphere, to this area in particular, or was it just convenient to your home, or. . . .
RD: I knew I wanted to be on the west side, and to work out here, because of the weather, sort of the clarity. I didn't realize that it had a very special kind of light that I, I discovered later. But at any rate, I had to wait in that studio. There was a room in the center of the second floor upstairs, and quite a bit, half as large as this room, and the light was terrible. But it was okay for drawing. I didn't try and set up, do oil painting there, but I drew for, oh, about eight months, I think, and then finally Sam left, and I moved into the old back section. Incidentally, a year later, Sam came back and took the front section.
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RD: So we both have, we had the whole top floor then.
SL: What a dynamic duo, painting up there.
RD: Yeah. Seldom saw Sam. He was there at night; I was there in the daytime.
SL: Did you have natural light coming into that back space?
RD: Yeah, it was pretty good light. It wasn't as good as this, but it was okay.
SL: And so you drew for eight months.
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RD: I was just drawing to, because I like to draw. And it was--I didn't realize it at the time--but I was coming to the end of the representational period and I was aware that things were flattening out and I was, the work in a good many ways was becoming more abstract, and. . . .
SL: Was there something in the [air], an influence, or something out there?
RD: I don't know. I really. . . . Well, right along, in the representational painting, I had. . . . Well, this works the other way around, too, but. . . . Oh, I don't think maybe a three-month period went by that I didn't sometime in that period go back to abstract painting and decide that I was an abstract painter again. And sometimes it would last for a day; sometimes this would last for a whole week. And then I'd go back again.
SL: Was this a conscious seesaw, or. . . .
RD: I think that I. . . . Oh, it's a little hard to say exactly what it was; it was many things really. But I think. . . . It can be as simple as this, that a painter is often getting into serious trouble with his work, and when that would happen, well, I'd say, "Well, the trouble is that I'm doing the wrong thing. I should be back where I belong--as an abstract painter."
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RD: And this worked the other way around, too, and when I did abstract painting again, I, a good many times I [thought, when] I was going back to representation. . . . That large drawing down there, not drawing there, things that I've done out the window here. You can't see those things now because of construction across the street. {The Gehry Egg Co. Remodel}
SL: . . . in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky describes abstraction and figuration as two branches of the great old tree, and that they both grow out of the same source, and that they're not mutually exclusive. . . .
RD: I have to agree with that, yeah.
SL: But pursuing two tracks simultaneously could often be very difficult as well, could it not?
RD: Impossible for me. I'm either looking in one direction or the other. They're, they, they're just. . . . I think lots of people think that becoming an abstract painter from being a representational painter might be as simple as turning the picture upside down or, you know, you're still. . . . But it's of course not. It's conceptually, emotionally. . . . They're the two major, I mean, that is the polarity for me that I've discovered in art.
SL: When you're working in one [spirit], I would think that all of your subconscious thinking and solving are directed in one direction.
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SL: They concern a set of possibilities, and when you consider doing figuration, you would consider a whole other constellation of possibility.
RD: . . . This was, believe it or not, accidental. It looks so much like grass and possibly ocean and then the, and a kind of. . . .
SL: Very active sky, yes.
RD: . . . menace in the sky, and it looks as though I really intended that, but I didn't see that. I worked rather late on it last night, and got pretty upset with it and. . . . [But, Then] I didn't realize that problem until I walked in this morning. I said, "Oh, my. I've done this lovely little landscape through a doorway."
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RD: And that kind of thing of course can happen, but the doing of representational problems involves the embracing of, well, as you said, a whole set of concerns and values and, well. . . .
SL: So, let's see, so you were, you had the studio in Ocean Park, and aside from Sam Francis, were there other artists in that building or in the neighborhood? That you spent time with?
RD: Yeah, Sam Amato was across the street in the same block, and Les Biller shared that studio. Then there was Jim. . . . [Remembering:] A mountain in Arizona where I've been. Oh!
SL: Turrell?
RD: Jim Turrell. Jim Turrell was up at the next corner. There's a conceptual artist on that block who I don't know very well. Still there, I think. I can't think of. . . . Oh, Tony Berlant was there, was on Second Street.
SL: Did it feel like a neighborhood of artists, or was it a place you went, did your work pretty well in. . . .
RD: I would see Les Biller or Sam Amato. I'd see them at school.
SL: UCLA.
RD: I'd visit their studio once in six months, I guess, and occasionally we'd have a cup of coffee or something like that, beer. And then, as I told you, Sam was there at night. And why that was, why he worked at night, [you'd] have to ask him. Jim, I visited Turrell several times.
SL: Was he making room environments then?
RD: Yeah, um hmm. It was just a nice experience [together] with that studio, because everything was arranged and. . . . I mean, one can have these feelings about that--where everything is arranged--but nevertheless, everything--well, I was going to say everything was arranged with absolute care, and so that light at a certain hour came, and at a certain time of year hit here and did such and such. It was. . . .
SL: Those were special times when people made those studios.
RD: Yes. There's the German woman. . . . What's her name?
SL: Oh, Maria Nordman?
RD: Yeah, Nordman, yeah.
RD: She had a. . . . One of the places that I visited that she did, one of her studios, was at Beethoven and _____. I forget. It was very significant to her, the intersection. Beethoven and something else that would have to do with German history or something.
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[Tape 9, side B]
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SL: . . . So, you were drawing and you were making a whole group of drawings, and these were figurative drawings, right?
RD: Uh, yes. And I was. . . . I got to like the room very much, and it was a rectangular room with windows all the way around. It was in the center of the building. I don't know what it had been originally--some sort of a club. And it was, I think this was the kitchen area for the club, in the center, and surrounding it were. . . . There was a ballroom in the front, where Sam worked, beautiful floor. And I guess there was some sort of a lounge in the back, where I had my. . . .
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RD: And off of my room there was a kind of. . . . What do you call it when there's a window from a kitchen into an eating area. . . .
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RD: . . . But this little room, which was part of the kitchen, and the window into the big room, it was visually, it was put together in a good way, or in a way that I got to, got quite involved with drawing. So I made some drawings of that. And, so, I kept myself busy. I was really terribly anxious to get into the big studio with the light and the space, but then finally Sam left and. . . .
SL: So the paintings you title Ocean Park began in '67.
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SL: . . . From the ones I have seen in person, they seem rather large.
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SL: Was it an enhancement of scale, that you all did? The Berkeley paintings, many of them are large, but they don't seem as large as that.
RD: But they're not nearly as. . . . No, no. No telling why, but I wanted to work roughly that size, and then my canvas, the cotton duck that I bought was 84 inches.
SL: That's pretty big.
RD: So that was three inches to turn over; that left 81. So my width was almost always 81 inches. And so then the height was what I could get out of the place, out of my . . . without doing an alteration of my door. And I could get a, well, I could manage to get a 93 out, I think. No, a 100.
SL: That's a big painting. (chuckles)
RD: Yeah. It was a relatively small, awkward hall, so 100 inches by 81 was the largest that I did.
SL: So as you set these canvases up, do you remember the. . . . Was there a switch to another sensibility, or a different vision of what you wanted to do as you set these larger canvases in a bigger space?
RD: Well, it interested me, having received the book that you just looked at [Richard Diebenkorn, by Gerald Nordland, Rizzoli, New York, 1987--SL], and I was looking at some of the late representational painting. I still, I was painting representationally when I moved into the big space.
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RD: And I noticed, to my surprise, I realized I'd done some pretty large pieces, but they were that size. So the 81-dimension-canvas thing preceded my announcing to myself that now I was an abstract painter and approaching the canvas in that way. So the horse--or the cart came, I guess, just before the horse.
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SL: The earliest of them seem to have larger wedges of color, that were rather strong and assertive. . . .
SL: . . . and often vertical, but not always.
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SL: And they had a kind of architecture to them that was. . . .
RD: Yes. And they were, I think, most of them were more thinly painted than later on. Less densely painted. I think they perhaps were a little more airy, more atmospheric. Do you feel that?
SL: Yes. And yet at the same time, they're very, they have a lot of bone to them, substance.
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SL: Those wedges carry from a long distance. You don't see through them. They're quite. . .
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SL: Maybe we're thinking of different paintings, but I have a feeling in mind that they're heavy with, oh, oranges and greens and very assertive colors.
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SL: Let's see, one of the things I wanted to ask is more of a general question, about the whole Ocean Park group of paintings. Do you feel that within this long run of work that there are certain subdivisions or episodes that suggest themselves? Switches or groups that stick together and then another group comes along.
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SL: In other words, are there subsets to the larger set?
RD: I guess mainly the main difference I see is in the, is the atmospheric aspect. I don't think there was any. . . . I don't think there was any moment when I said, "I'm gonna reorient things. I'm going. . . ." I think the changes that occurred evolved, and did so piece by piece, or work by work. And. . . . This is maybe something I'll regret saying, or maybe I'll feel that I didn't mean to say it: Something that at first I thought I wanted to get away from was, in representational painting, a kind of insisting on--which is built into representational painting. . . . If you're going to do a figure, well, you are going to do a figure, and. . . .
SL: Declare a subject.
RD: Yeah, and the arms go here, and the heads there, and it has eyes, and. . . . [When, Well] I think along with this can come a kind of need to insist, or to exert will, to. . . . It seemed like toward the end of the representational period that there were things that I, that perhaps I would have done if it weren't for the logic of a situation. I mean, the logic that I would feel that was required in this chosen subject.
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RD: I'm making this terribly complicated; it's not complicated.
SL: Are these painterly things, or. . . .
RD: Well, an example would be, well, I suppose, gravity. I've certainly never even flirted with. Oh yes, I guess in drawings, I did, but with surrealism, or I temperamentally was very, very far from a Chagall, who can have somebody flying or upside down or. . . . There was a certain sense, a certain logic, about this figure is going to be in such and such an interior, and the light is going to be in a certain way, and it's going to be a woman, or whatever. And so it's a. . . .
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SL: Sure. So the working abstractly gave you a greater freedom.
RD: Well, I thought it would. [both chuckle, meaning that it did not--Trans.] And I should have known, because I had been an abstract painter before, but it didn't work that way. But it was one of the reasons why I, one of the reasons why I wanted to change. I wanted to get away from having to follow all the obligations, so to speak, that were carried by a given subject that I would. . . . And, in brief, I suppose I just wanted more freedom. And I was continually thinking back to the abstract painting, and those years, and it seemed to me that things just flowed so freely, and it was kind of invention and--what's the word I want?--improvisation, that, which was exciting. Things would turn over for me, and. . . . Turn over and in a half an hour I could be on a different footing, and so that was. . . SL: So did you feel some of that as you went back into abstraction?
RD: Oh, at first, sure. [said with a smile:] But then, it doesn't take long before that totally different set of disciplines start to, in the bad moment, start to throttle you, and so it's finally all the same thing, and. . . . But, one has moments of hope when he changes to a new scene.
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RD: I think I probably, at first at any rate, wanted a kind of monumental thing. I wanted something that felt large. Also, there's a thing about working large--for me at any rate, and I've found it with some other artists in talking--that in working on a what you might say is an oversize support, one is involved physically.
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SL: Okay, I guess I was wondering if there was anything that sort of came into the work that hadn't already been there, at that point, to give the bone or the structure. Was there. . . .
RD: I think what came into it was that changing the discipline caused me to look at different things, caused me to dwell on different aspects of my visual experience. In the studio, in the other, the earlier studio, there were windows to the east, large windows that were. . . . Transom windows? Do you understand?
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RD: No. . . . there was this situation of a large, lighted rectangle, a more of a square within it, and then, seen from the side, the transom provided the diagonal. . . . Well, there's just so many of the elements there, and I remember several more astute people who visited that studio said, "Well, look, you're painting your transom windows." (laughter)
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SL: Do you think the. . . . You mentioned the Turrell studio, and Maria's [Nordman--Ed.] studio, and all that. Do you think any of that awareness of the architecture and the. . . . Was that in the air here, or was it just something real special in your space?
RD: I don't, I guess I don't think so. I don't think anybody around there was. . . . As a matter of fact, I didn't meet Turrell until several years before I left that neighborhood and moved up here. So I don't think so.
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SL: And that's, it seems studios often in New York are just spaces, and the light is pretty terrible often, and. . . .
RD: Yes.
SL: . . . they're very inward.
RD: Yes.
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SL: People almost make a fetish of their studios here sometimes, in a way that's sometimes charming and sometimes very intense.
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[Continue To Tape 10] --- [Return To Top of Richard Diebenkorn Interview]
SL: Okay, last question. You're about to move again.
RD: Yes.
SL: And where are you going and when and why and what sort of physical environment will you have?
RD: Well, the best thing I can, best reasons I can give for leaving here. . . . Well. . . . I guess I'm feeling kind of claustrophobia, and I think the pace that I once found very exciting is, I feel that I've, well, I've just sort of had it with that.
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RD: It's near Healdsburg [California--SL].
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SL: Uh huh. Is it all green and lush, or. . . .
RD: Well, now it is, yeah. And it's Alexander Valley, so it's a lot of grape to be seen, vinyards. And there are mountains, and there's Mount St. Helena out the from door.
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SL: Very exciting. So you will be leaving this studio, this one up. . . .
RD: I'm going to keep the studio for a while. And, or I may just keep the building, I don't really know. Yeah. I guess that's it.
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RD: Oh yes. And often there are things that I want to do. I have this itch to be working on something, and I really have only two hours when I'm home, and then I think, "Well, it's going to take me fifteen minutes to get down here, and I'm going to have to get fifteen to get home. I'll just get started when I get down here, what. . . ." So I won't come. And if I'm working with my studios at home while I'm there. . . .
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END OF RICHARD DIEBENKORN INTERVIEW