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Richard Diebenkorn - From the Abstraction category:
Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Accomplishment category:
I can never accomplish what I want – only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Artists category:
My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. He hoped I would see my way to more serious work and would find myself turning towards medicine, law, or business. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Beginning category:
All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Beginning category:
I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Composition category:
I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Courage category:
-from his own pre-painting list...
Don't be a Pollyanna! (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Fear category:
Of course, I don't go onto the studio with the idea of 'saying' something – that's ludicrous. What I do is face the blank canvas, which is terrifying. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Freedom category:
My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Imagination category:
If you get an image try to destroy it. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Life category:
It is not a matter of painting life. It's a matter of giving life to a painting. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Limitations category:
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Observation category:
I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Painting category:
In a successful painting everything is integral – all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Painting category:
... putting down what I felt in terms of some overall image at the moment today, and perhaps being terribly disappointed with it tomorrow... trying to make it better and then despairing and destroying partially or wholly... getting back into it and just kind of frantically trying to pull something into this rectangle that made sense to me... (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Power category:
As a work progresses, its power to elicit and dictate response mounts. There seems to be an optimum moment when this power is at its greatest which just precedes the point where 'elicit' is no longer apt usage. 'Dictates' is the word for this condition and tyranny is the adversary. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Reality category:
Reality has to be digested, it has to be transmuted by paint. It has to be given a twist of some kind. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Satisfaction category:
If it doesn't sit right I'm not really saying it. Getting it to sit right is another thing – complicated, time-consuming, wasteful. It comes around to what is contained in 'sitting right.' This is what the picture is about. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Space category:
I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Strength category:
I came to mistrust my desire to explode the picture and supercharge it in some way... what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve – tension beneath calm. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Struggle category:
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Subject category:
One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Subject category:
Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Symbols category:
I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Technique category:
And I can just see that sometimes the technique is blasting powder rather than steady struggle. (Richard Diebenkorn)
Richard Diebenkorn - From the Tones category:
If what a person makes is completely and profoundly right according to his lights then this work contains the whole man. A work which falls short of this content, is only of passing value and lends itself to arbitrariness and fragmentation. (Richard Diebenkorn)
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