revisiting Diebenkorn

The work of painter Richard Diebenkorn has held meaning for me since before I ever picked up a paintbrush. His work has continued to inspire me as I develop my own painting career (see, for example my post of May 3, 2010).  During our recent trip to the Bay Area, we had the chance to see an exhibit of his work at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco. The exhibit focused on his years in Berkeley, CA, when he developed a strong abstract expressionist style (for example, Berkeley #19, 1954, at left), before turning to figurative painting. Later, living in southern CA, he returned to abstraction and produced his remarkable Ocean Park series.

What is it that draws me so to Diebenkorn's work? In part it is because there is a figurative reality beneath his abstraction, as this exhibition emphasized. Diebenkorn himself said that figuration gave him "something to come up against." This is like a clarion call to me, especially after my summer of study with David Dornan, when he forced me to ground myself in the reality of bricks even as I explored abstraction (September 24, 2010 post). Another aspect of Diebenkorn's work that speaks to me is that each painting, even the most abstract, tells a story. Storytelling as a part of abstraction seems almost an oxymoron, and yet, and yet, I think that the emptiness I have perceived in some of my own paintings is exactly the lack of a story. David Dornan also talked about telling stories, including about making the story one of an emotion, such as the tenderness of a mother and child referenced by a single rock at the bottom of a cliff. Diebenkorn said that working from a base of figuration not only provides external constraints compositionally, but also provides something to push against in terms of an emotional response.

I would like to incorporate more storytelling, which conveys emotion, in my work. In Diebenkorn there is a sense of tension between the two aspects of figuration/representation and emotion/intuition that I can sense but not articulate. In my own work, I have addressed the representational side, in terms of its abstraction, far more than I have the emotional, storytelling side. How to represent emotion, must less make it abstract? Or maybe abstraction is the vehicle to expressing emotion. Or maybe one begins with the story, then considers its emotion, and in making the story abstract, portrays its emotion.

How to approach this? I have an impulse to return to drawing (figuration) for a while, for inspiration, relaxation, and encouragement. It would be a welcome break from, as well as a complement to, working abstractly. Rendering the correct angles of a mountainside is a piece of cake compared to interpreting the mountain abstractly, yet it may also provide a doorway into how to portray that mountain on an emotional/intuitive level. Similarly, I think that for me still life could be a doorway into exploring the interior, personal world on a more accessible level than through the grandeur of a desert sunset. Still life can emphasize emotional states and intuitive perceptions (among many other things) in a close-up, careful way that invites compositional invention such as cropping, or skewing traditional linear perspective (i.e., abstraction) while still dealing with figuration. One quest is to find objects that resonate for me, as bottles did for Morandi.