The Whole Richard Diebenkorn

In a successful painting everything is integral—all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness. —Richard Diebenkorn

Over the past month, while working on a particularly challenging project, I have immersed myself in the work of Richard Diebenkorn, hoping it would provide me with insight, confirmations, new pathways. I’ve always been drawn to his paintings on an emotional level, particularly the Berkeley and Ocean Park series, which embody for me the essential soul of California.

All the parts belong to the whole.

This month, however, I turned to the more technical aspects of his work. Specifically I was looking for clues in the “armatures,” those compositional structures which organize and anchor his paintings. In that study, I have discovered the magical interplay of organic and geometric shapes, which Diebenkorn recombined in seemingly endless variation.

After a brief student period, when he made preparatory sketches for his paintings, Diebenkorn worked pretty much intuitively—that is, without preconception of the final painting’s appearance. The process of painting was for him was always about the process of arriving at “the idea.”

I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered.

I took this to mean that the “idea” is to be found in the successful resolution of the interaction of forms on the flat surface. Does this interaction create harmony, tension, spatial depth (or not), flow, a pathway for the eye?

Imagine how different Construct (above) would have been without that vertical black column on the left. First, it creates the visual tension of two rectangles conversing. Further tension is created by the abutting boundary of its circle against the adjacent curvalinear shape. Additionally, Imagine how unexciting the etching might have been if all the shape lines were straight or angular. The red shape on the right is both pleasing and mysterious. Does it represent negative or positive space?

The composition of Untitled #22 seems to have aligned itself along an armature consisting of a two-barred cross, formed by the white strip (which bisects the canvas horizontally) and red line and large flesh-colored shape in the middle, which suggest vertical axes. The large green shape on the left might seem a startling intervention, until you realize that all that red (pink) and yellow needed a complementary pigment foil (aka green).

Imagine the above collage missing the whimsical red sail-like shape or the blue stip at the bottom. Both serve to knock your eye right back into the collage.

Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.

Diebenkorn’s relentless revising stands as a record of his search to find “the idea.” We see traces of where the artist has ventured and backtracked, started out anew. Diebenkorn was adamant about avoiding painting solutions that felt too familiar or comfortable. He deliberately cultivated a awkwardness in paintings, by introducing discordant hues, leaving some areas raw and unfinished, and painting over areas in pursuit of a completely new direction.

In the end, however, he almost always found his “idea,” that solution particular to each painting of organic and geometric forms conversing in different ways.