Christopher Knight The Challenging Art of Reinvention 1 April 1993 Los Angeles Times, 1993, 1966
"Richard Diebenkorn wasn't the first important modernist painter to develop in California, but he was the first of the breed to gain an enduring national reputation for his art. His death from respiratory failure Tuesday, just three weeks shy of his 71st birthday, marks a turning point.
"The abundant series of often large, airy abstractions called the "Ocean Park" paintings, which Diebenkorn began shortly after his 1966 move from San Francisco to the Santa Monica neighborhood that gave the series its name, was to seal his critical reputation. In them, aqueous veils of brushy and often limpid color are hung on a linear scaffold of drawing.
"The combination simultaneously evokes both the man-made infrastructure of a suburban landscape and the physical construction of wooden stretcher bars, canvas and color, from which a painting is assembled.
". . .
"Yet, these neat divisions can be misleading. A sense of duality, in which recognizable imagery and total abstraction both play a part, was a constant throughout his mature career. The designation of abstract or figurative is more a matter of shifting emphasis, from one body of work to the next.
"The emphasis is certainly guided by an internal pictorial logic, for Diebenkorn was nothing if not a painter whose canvases accrued from a slow, deliberate accumulation of painterly marks and compositional decisions, of fussed-over erasures and changes of heart. Among much else, each painting tells a narrative of its own making.
"The emphasis was also guided by larger questions, although not in the way that some have supposed . . .
"Instead, the artist's seemingly dramatic shifts, girded by a firm foundation of aesthetic continuity, were a conscious means for shaking off complacency and self-deception . . .