Diebenkorn - Oppsosites Appeal

Richard Diebenkorn, (1923 –1993)
Ocean Park No. 54, 1972
100 x 81 inches
Oil on canvas

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

How many paintings did Diebenkorn do in his Ocean Park series? I don't know, but I've been attracted to every one I've come across. This painting, like the others, is a complex mixture of opposites: seen and unseen, definite and hazy, rigid and flexible. Underlying the surface is a skeleton of hard, incised lines, straight and inflexible, but each of these lines have other lines corssing them, deflecting them. The lines sweem to make usggestions rather than rules. Ane the paint pays little or no attention to the rules proposed by the lines. The overlays of colors are soft, obscuring and revealing the lines at the same time. What a joy for the eyes and the mind!