Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/richard-diebenkorn-a-door-opened/
Ashley West writes about Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings after a recent visit to the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Cororan Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through September 23, 2012.
West recalls his first exposure to Diebenkorn's paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1991: "A door was opened and it dawned on me that here was an approach to painting that was both measured and free – on the one hand the geometric structure was alive, dynamic, felt, and on the other the freedom of brushwork and colour was intensified through containment. These paintings were rigorous in their abstraction and presence, while expressing a sublime feeling for landscape. They seemed to epitomise for me painting in its purest sense, and I was compelled to explore what he was doing through my own work. The geometry was important, and in the first paintings I would rule out a grid as a starting point, but this was something to work from or against. The key seemed to be in the extent to which one could dissolve or rework statements, placing more emphasis on the process of search rather than accepting something as final too soon."
Link to Post:
http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/diebenkorns-fields-of-silence/
Deborah Barlow writes about the her experiences viewing Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. through Septmber 23, 2012.
Barlow notes that a "facet of this work and this artist that is important to not overlook is what Ocean Park has come to say about Diebenkorn himself. He had a dogged commitment to his own vision of things. He wasn’t belligerent or a contrarian, but he stubbornly followed his own path. In a filmed interview that accompanies the show, Diebenkorn answers a question about who the audience for his work is by stating, 'I paint for an 'ideal viewer.' ' After a brief pause he wryly added, 'And that ideal viewer just may be me.' "
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/off-the-cuff-and-on-the-money-richard-diebenkorn/
An essay on the achievements of Richard Diebenkorn, republished by Mario Naves on the occasion of the exhibition the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through September 23, 2012.
Naves writes: "Matisse is the crucial source for the Ocean Park pictures. Not a few observers, after visiting the Matisse in Morocco exhibition at MOMA in 1990, remarked upon the similarity of the backdrop for Zorah on the Terrace (1912) to Diebenkorn's paintings. It is a not adventitious historical rhyme, as Diebenkorn would have been the first to admit. Yet to claim that he did little more than finesse (and fret over) Matisse for almost thirty years is to mistake a profound engagement with tradition for accomplished hackwork. With their pensive harmonies and stoic elegance, the Ocean Park paintings divulge their antecedents without reiterating them... Diebenkorn knew that the hurdle of tradition is not to recapitulate history, but to make tradition speak in a form that is as individual as it is contemporary. He also knew when it needed prodding. By transmuting his forebears into something personal and fresh, Diebenkorn claimed his status as an unapologetic modernist."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/54173/watcher-from-the-skies-richard-diebenkorns-ocean-park-series/
James Gibbons reviews the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through September 23, 2012.
Gibbons writes: "The interplay of cultivation and erasure that [Dibenkorn] discerned from his bird's-eye perch offers one way to grasp Diebenkorn's later abstractions, which often evoke the sensation of being suspended from a great height, gazing down into a parceled landscape or landscape analogue. Inviting yet austere, these spacious canvases suggest the earth’s palimpsest when seen from above: flat and smoothed out, but layered with spectral traces of what’s been worn down, scraped away, superseded but not yet obliterated."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/art-meditation_b_1627635.html
John Seed writes about the trend toward "slow looking" he observed recently at the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park at the Orange County Museum of Art and traces its roots to the Rothko Chapel commission.
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/06/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-ocean-park/
Tyler Green talks to curator Sarah Bancroft and conservator Ana Alba about the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from June 30 - September 23, 2012.
Bancroft notes that the Corcoran exhibit includes both Ocean Park #6 and Ocean Park #11, the "earliest paintings in the series, the first five were destroyed or put away…[by the artist]... they're both much more biomorphic and organic… they have a stronger relationship to his figurative work."
Bancroft also discusses an interesting commission Diebenkorn completed: documenting water reclammation projects in Arizona. She notes that "[Diebenkorn] often commented about the idea of process in the land, and seeing this history of what had happened, whether it be tilling or scarring or working the land, and he wanted to get that idea into his work… the history of the making of the painting is the painting. It's that idea of topography, of process… rather than obliterating the history of his compositional expression over time, allowing you to really see it…"
Link to Post:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/02/art-review-richard-diebenkorn-the-ocean-park-series-at-ocma.html
Christopher Knight reviews the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California through May 27, 2012.
Knight writes: "The narrative in these paintings is a story of their making... One result is an intensified sense of the here and now, a moment that seems right and sure and achingly ephemeral, poised to slip away. Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings are all about the pentimenti -- the earlier images, forms and strokes that have been changed and painted over. The surface opens to expose what lies beneath it, and the past becomes present."
Link to Post:
http://neotericart.com/2012/02/13/diebenkorns-ocean-park-series-provisional-action-provisional-vision-by-matthew-ballou/
Matthew Ballou looks at Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings through the lens of "provisional painting."
Ballou writes that "To get a clear view of Diebenkorn's connection with provisionality one must think about the sense of compositional balance exemplified in the Ocean Park Series. It is a balance that is hard-won yet still teetering on the edge of disarray. Though the works are in some ways locked, they flicker and undulate; these are compositions that don’t always feel as if rightness was absolutely achieved."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/12/richard-diebenkorn-ocean-park-at-mamfw/
Tyler Green reviews the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park at the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, on view through January 15, 2012.
Green notes that Diebenkorn's " 'Ocean Park' is the body of work that most absorbs and considers virtually every key innovation of 20th-century painting."
Link to Post:
http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/pacific-standard-time-begin-the-rewrite/
Deborah Barlow posts about the paintings on view at the multi-venue art exhibition Pacific Standard Time, including paintings by Ed Moses, John Altoon, Lee Mullican, Mary Corse, Richard Diebenkorn, Ronald Davis, and Sam Francis.
Barlow writes that "The experience (of the exhibitions) as it turns out is even more overwhelming and implication-rich than I imagined... And even though I spent my early life on the West Coast and am very familiar with the work of many of these California artists, the visual impact still has me feeling a bit too dizzied to offer a linear account."
