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Richard Diebenkorn’s art was greatly influenced by his immediate environment. In 1966 Diebenkorn moved to Santa Monica, on the ocean, near Los Angeles, and he had a studio in the Ocean Park district. Here, the artist’s commitment to observing the landscape of the Pacific Coast came to fruition in his non-objective, abstract Ocean Park Series of paintings and drawings. Diebenkorn began these works in 1967 and continued to explore this imagery for the rest of his career. While the use of line and color relates to his more representational and figurative works, the Ocean Park Series possesses a new and heightened sense of structure and space. Additionally, the works can be visualized as a synthesis of many diverse influences from earlier in his career, including Matisse, Cubism, and the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Despite these sources of inspiration, Diebenkorn sought a more personal expression, creating works whose structural clarity emphasized their luminosity.
Unlike Diebenkorn’s early Ocean Park paintings, the early drawings are typically spare and schematic. However, by the mid-1970s the drawings become more complex and colorful and as fully realized as the paintings. By the late seventies, the drawings had become increasingly sophisticated and varied. Works such as Untitled (Ocean Park Drawing) typify Diebenkorn’s works of the 1980s. They are tougher and bolder, using more discordant shapes and colors that seem daring in comparison the to more delicate linearity of the previous decades.
The works in the Ocean Park Series are large in scale and generally use a vertical format, resulting in a highly structured composition that disguises the active process of exploration involved in their making. In Untitled (Ocean Park Drawing), Diebenkorn began by sketching directly onto the paper, then painting, correcting, masking, and scraping away in a continual process of revision and refinement. Through this process the artist created a multi-layered surface with opaque passages, corrections and remnants of partially erased lines that emerge from the surface. While Untitled (Ocean Park Drawing) suggests the passage of time through the visible revisions and layers, its geometric forms suggest architecture. The red triangle in the lower portion of the drawing is set against a bold blue square that dominates the work. Though abstract in design, Diebenkorn’s drawings are rooted in his observations of the environment and are vital and innovative interpretations of his surroundings.
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