Richard Diebenkorn at OCMA

Ocean Park #79  1975

Today, my wife and I went to see the exhibit Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Orange County Museum of Art - getting in on the museum's free second Sunday program.  The exhibit features approximately 80 of Diebenkorn's works which includes paintings, prints, drawings, and collages created between the late 1960's and 1980's.

Berkeley #19  1954

Ever since I first discovered his work in my teens, I have been drawn to the curious geometry and color fields of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings.  It wasn't until much later that I learned more about the unique path of his artistic career.  For the first seven years of his professional life, he followed a distinctive abstract style until he made a sudden shift to a representational mode in 1955 that lasted until an equally sudden shift and return to abstraction in 1967. 

Richard Diebenkorn 1962

Diebenkorn remains one of the leading artists of the West Coast abstract expressionism movement that began in the 1950's .  Each work was for him a search for "rightness" - working and reworking the canvas, scraping and repainting, building up layers as well as atmospheric fields and planes, finally arriving at a solution through a combination of intention, intuition and improvisation.

Still Life    1957