Gerald Nordland, Catalogue Essay: Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), 2000, 1984, 1971, 1969, 1960s
Ocean Park; Works on Paper
"Richard Diebenkorn entered into the Ocean Park Series in the late nineteen sixties while he was teaching at U.C.L.A., living in Santa Monica Canyon and had his studio in the "Ocean Park"section of that city. . . .
"Diebenkorn was recognized early in his career as the leading West Coast abstract expressionist painter as he began to show in private galleries and was invited to show in national and international museum exhibitions. He met regularly with David Park (1911-1960) and Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991)to discuss recent work, and to draw from hired models. In those weekly sessions he listened to Park and Bischoff discuss their figurative work and he was tempted to experiment with a landscape or still life to see if he would feel the same enthusiasm in realistic painting problems. He wanted his work to be more inclusive, but he had to keep his painting conceptions intact. He painted a cityscape and made a few still lifes which he found exhilarating, and moved ahead in eager anticipation, still uncertain whether he would continue in this vein. He was intrigued by the effect that human figures had on the mood and flavor of painting. As he worked at the new figurative paintings he was receiving recognition, awards, gallery success, exhibition invitations, museum retrospectives, based on his abstract work. He was invited to tour the U.S.S.R. to give slide talks to Members of the Soviet Artist's Union. In Leningrad, he was privileged to see the Shchukin Collection of Matisse's, which reinforced his admiration for that master.
"While teaching at U.C.L.A. his stop gap studio in the Ocean Park area, had no daylight and was not suitable for painting, so for nearly a year he focused on figure drawing, producing many of the most impressive works of his career in drawing media. As soon as Diebenkorn* moved into a day lighted studio, he turned to painting large canvasses in still life, interiors and single figure images, which were singularly masterful, grandly conceived compositions. But suddenly, to his surprise, he found himself making abstract paintings. In 1969 he said of this evolution:
""It's been a great release for me to be able to follow the painting in terms of just what I want for the painting, as opposed to the qualifying that I found I had to do in figure painting. I'm not the kind of painter or colorist...who can paint pink flesh blue and make it stick. I could never do that. If I painted skin blue, well, I could try it, but I would have to change it...[In my figure painting] I would start out with brave, bold color and a kind of spatiality that came through in terms of the color. Then I would find gradually I'd have to be knocking down this stuff that I liked in order to make it right with this figure, this environment, this representation. It was a kind of compromise that on one hand can be marvelous, and what painting seems all about; and on the other hand becomes inhibiting restraint. "(1)
"The Ocean Park canvases were generally vertical works measuring around 90 inches in height and 72 in width within the painting reach and physical grasp of a large man. Those measurements happened to be about as large as could be safely angled through his studio door and down the steep stairway for transport. The canvases tended to be developed on a newly devised grid of vertical and horizontal areas of abutting color, with underlying drawing and occasional defining diagonals. The color areas were richly brush formed, sensuous to the eye, the hues strong and singing but often enhanced by areas of neutral or more delicate color which could evoke suggestions of atmosphere or landscape. His painting process was based on many thin layers of semi transparent color and adjusted drawing which slowly coalesced into an inimitable paint body. One reads linear demarcations, underpainting, remains of revised compositional divisions, residues of scrapings and pentimental build ups, which have found their proper balance in completed works. Some of the early Ocean Park paintings suggest landscape or biomorphic subjects, others are clearly architectonic structures. His painting process itself did not change with his shifts, away from and back to abstraction, but remained similar: he never looked for a specific result, approached each work afresh, resisted formula, preferring to plunge the whole composition into chaos rather than repeat himself. The most distinctive Ocean Park images present an original pure abstract painting esthetic which is complex, flat, and shifting, but mysteriously related to the principles of his lifelong masters&-;Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian.
"Diebenkorn did not make preparatory drawings for his large structured Ocean Park paintings. He began them with a process of getting acquainted with the scale and shape of the support and the rhythms that seemed to conform to the particular proportions. At some point he began to take the effort seriously and proceeded to develop the emerging visual ideas with his accumulated experience and skepticism. Henri Matisse once wrote, "A large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium." (2) Diebenkorn's drawings were developed in a parallel but separate fashion in the same creative struggle. Both reflect light and space through an integration of elements, line, surface, monochrome or color, illusion and radiance, which are intuitively converted into a syntax of his own invention, evolved from his lifelong examination of historic and modern art.
"Large canvases pose different problems than do comparatively small sheets of paper. Diebenkorn had strong feelings about the difference:
""My reasons for doing 'drawings' (many of them are fully developed paintings) are roughly twofold. [My drawings] often begin as sketchy explorations of ideas, which then hook me into further and then complete development. This activity, up to the point where it becomes for me a serious work, is related to my larger oil on canvas pieces and is a kind of a tryout or rehearsal of general possibilities. It ceases to be this, however, at the point of becoming an independent work. The other reason, which somehow in no sense excludes the first, is my need to do relatively small works, independent of others and complete in themselves. But a small canvas usually becomes for me an unfeasible miniature. Paper, however, I find is something else, lending itself to the different scale of the small size. It is almost as though if I can call my work a large drawing instead of a small canvas it becomes possible." (3)
"The small but elegant selection of Ocean Park works in this exhibition have been gathered from 1971-1984 the kernel of what is now recognized as the artist's most distinctive period as a world class painter, draughtsman and printmaker. The Ocean Park "drawings", or "paintings on paper", were improvised directly on their specific sheets, as were the large paintings on their canvas support. Due to the scale of the works on paper, the artist's working methods could be immediate in that he did not need to move back to an appropriate viewing distance before making decisions concerning adjustments. At arms' distance, graphite and charcoal could be erased or corrected flexibly, and he could amplify or reiterate an imprecise line, an interrupted surface, a contradiction of spatiality. Unsatisfying relationships between colors were more difficult, but problems of drying time could be largely ignored.
" . . . "
Gerald Nordland, Chicago, August 2000
Gerald Nordland directed museums in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Milwaukee. He is the author of Richard Diebenkorn published by Rizzoli, 1987.
(1)"New Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn," by Gail R. Scott. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June-July 1969, p. 6.
(2) Henri Matisse quote from Matisse on Art , Jack D. Flam [ed.], N.Y.: Phaidon, 1973, p.73.
(3) Drawings 1974-84, by Frank Gettings. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1984, p. 254.
(4) Richard Diebenkorn, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., November 1980, p. 23.