Charles Tarlton's "Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park 17"

"...[the] classic situation of trying to reveal in language what the act of seeing provokes.”

                                                                                                              — Robert Creeley

The artist stands ready in the presence of a blank canvas, but nothing so far has happened.  Up ahead in time a finished painting is waiting, but something has to take place now to launch the creative act.  The painter has a long straight edge and a piece of charcoal; he draws three parallel horizontal lines, and then, fidgeting with the straight edge, lays in three more parallel lines diagonally.  The canvas has been “besmirched,” and the artist has his problem.

these are not pictures

out the transom, but pictures roused

by the geometry

of it. The lines creating

shapes in a regular pattern

from the toothings

of these inaugural gestures

the painting grows

according to a logic born

of the moment’s vagaries

Here is a definition of process.  Building on the stimulus of the first lines he drew on the canvas, the painter improvises colored shapes as needed, drawing other lines, following the promptings of whatever just emerged, gesture, then color, then another gesture, until he is exhausted.  But, wait, the next morning, back in the studio, he repents, and begins to scratch out and paint over yesterday’s markings, leaving hints to reveal here and there the way he had come.

he only knew it was

finished once he’d come back

from abandoning it

in despair, to find it all

working perfectly

any truth in the art

derives from his accruing

fragmented judgments

over a frantic period

of exasperated struggle

You cannot ask what any of it means or represents, more than his efforts to get right the thing that had kept going.  The peculiar angular drawings in the top half of the picture just happened in the working out of pressures from the day before.  They are pictures of nothing, lines arranged to the emotional satisfaction of the artist.  Still, they are interesting, are they not?

what do you think

stairways, the generally celestial?

closer up, the details

confute interpretation in the sense

of particular visions

what’s wonderful

is exactly that elaborate

drawing of figures

without subject or reference

then knowing they were right

All the Ocean Parks started the same manner, though this is not something one can say in a strictly historically way.  No one was there watching, but the familiar diagonals appear in nearly every painting (are they hiding in every one?) cutting across the horizontal-vertical matrix.  And in nearly every painting they have been worked back into the deep pentimenti by over-painting and erasure, never completely obliterated because they constituted the glimpse from which the works arose.  Not perfect evidence, perhaps, but enough to help us understand the genesis of the archetypal motif.

but still it’s details

differentiate each painting

from the others

keep each one interesting

in its own familial way

no two days alike

exactly, no two Ocean Parks

precisely the same

number of triangles, the same

dispositions of red

Art Criticism 101B

what if he had

a giant dictionary in his head

could he give meanings

to the shapes in their arrangement

so we’d know what they meant?

we might then indeed

find California light made manifest

O, geography of the west

in the myriad exotic objects

he is said to have portrayed

*Ocean Park #17 can be viewed online at: http://uima.uiowa.edu/richard-diebenkorn/

Here is an excerpt from the descriptive curatorial essay on the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s website, a perfect illustration of what is most wrong with Diebenkorn criticism today.

No. 17 is a brilliant example of Richard Diebenkorn's now legendary exploration of architecture and light in his Ocean Park series.  The Ocean Park works are essentially conversations between "ocean" — broad areas of atmospheric color implying nature's vastness — and "park" — ambiguous lines evoking a desire for order and containment.

“Ocean Park” refers neither to the “ocean” nor to a “park,” but to an area near the beach in Santa Monica, California, north and south of Ocean Park Blvd.  This is where Diebenkorn had a studio. 

Architecture?  The idea must arise from all the straight lines.  Light?  All the bright colors, yellow and white, why, they must be representative of—light.  Ocean?  I don’t know.  You tell me.  And park?  You mean park like grass and trees and, oh, aren’t those the legs of giant picnic tables?