Ocean Park itself is a community near Santa Monica, where Diebenkorn traces a daily path between home and studio, but whether or not these works make the topical references to local landscape with which they are credited, they clearly are something more than abstractions with recurrent compositional motifs and stunning juxtapositions of colour laid on with passion.
Diebenkorn substitutes reality with washes of colour, corrected and controlled by a drawn grid. His armature is loose, irregularly spaced and measured according to colour or scale, responding, always, to what Diebenkorn called ‘the incidental.’ While some may argue that this is nothing more than a repetitive theme, the real strength of this body of work are the myriad shifts and nuances that transform Ocean Park from piece to piece. The series displays a splendid range of colours and a variation of scale from small, intimate oil-on-wood works such as the Cigar Box Series (painted in the 1970s) to monumental tableaux. Though I have yet to see one ‘in the flesh’ the cigar box lid paintings are the ones I could find a little wall space for.
Cigar Box Lid #1
Cigar Box Lid #3
Cigar Box Lid #5
Cigar Box Lid #6
Cigar Box Lid #11
Ocean Park #19
Ocean Park #49
Ocean Park #67
Ocean Park #95
Ocean Park #105
Ocean Park #107
Ocean Park #114
Ocean Park #115
Ocean Park #116
Ocean Park #118
Ocean Park #125
Ocean Park #128
Ocean Park #130
Ocean Park #140
No comments:
Post a Comment