Richard Diebenkorn, Abstract Expressionist, retrospective at the de Young Museum, summer 2013, "The Berkeley Years: 1953-1966".
Abstract means to draw from or separate. In this sense, every art is abstract...a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. ... Seems to me the power of AE is the tension developed between possibilities of representation and its dissolution in powerful swaths of contours of color.
In representing works with human figures they are passive, quiet, introspective, emotionally immersed, in the latter painting paired yet ambiguous in their relationship and intentions for being present--for a pose, for art's sake? Far from the pride evoked in the subjects' gaze, dignity in earthly peasants or humble folk generally, Diebenkorn's people are not expressly passionate.
Isn't representational painting terribly tiring? they seem to murmur. In "View from the Porch 1959" the represented view only later comes hazily into focus...or "view": vertical railing lines spear the canvas suggesting the squaring off on geometrical sections in non-representational painting. Your preconceptions shimmer and hover and disappear like ghosts returning to darkened musty parlors.
Unspecified tension in waves through nearly empty room. Faces aren't rendered; woman's hand at her elbow suggests impatience (with perhaps being a subject?). Something frantic about drops of brown against background of head (me looking closely leaning in)...painting on a narrow canvas using small table or even a stool...couch behind: woman has either just gotten up, withholding sitting down, or has been standing for a time in pose. She could walk out any time; whether it would surprise the man or not, who knows. These two figures, off left, empty space. A narrow glimpse of verdant fields, and brown fields lying fallow. Turquoise rug with yellow background atop dark brown canvas; windows ambiguous as whether glass of an empty canvas...
These are the magical "Berkeley Series" named in numbers (22, 38, 44 etc). Colors and even forms are allow--freed--to portray their own coherence and coalesce in a vibrant balance. Shapes abstracted from traditional landscape, hills, fields, blue ocean, deep horizon but to cohere into a painting is the artist's responsibility, desire. A figure against the ground--this is landscape: colors of machinery and civilization against rural cultivation (see Kiran Chandra's "This Place, That Place") and nature--gray burn iron white stiff red fluttering cream purple hint of flesh, lines of roads, paths, fence boundary...themselves borders of the canvas
Richard Diebenkorn, Abstract Expressionist, retrospective at the de Young Museum, summer 2013, "The Berkeley Years: 1953-1966". Abstract means to draw from or separate. In this sense, every art is abstract...a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. ... Seems to me the power of AE is the tension developed between possibilities of representation and its dissolution in powerful swaths of contours of color. 
In representing works with human figures they are passive, quiet, introspective, emotionally immersed, in the latter painting paired yet ambiguous in their relationship and intentions for being present--for a pose, for art's sake? Far from the pride evoked in the subjects' gaze, dignity in earthly peasants or humble folk generally, Diebenkorn's people are not expressly passionate. Isn't representational painting terribly tiring? they seem to murmur. In "View from the Porch 1959" the represented view only later comes hazily into focus...or "view": vertical railing lines spear the canvas suggesting the squaring off on geometrical sections in non-representational painting. Your preconceptions shimmer and hover and disappear like ghosts returning to darkened musty parlors. 
Unspecified tension in waves through nearly empty room. Faces aren't rendered; woman's hand at her elbow suggests impatience (with perhaps being a subject?). Something frantic about drops of brown against background of head (me looking closely leaning in)...painting on a narrow canvas using small table or even a stool...couch behind: woman has either just gotten up, withholding sitting down, or has been standing for a time in pose. She could walk out any time; whether it would surprise the man or not, who knows. These two figures, off left, empty space. A narrow glimpse of verdant fields, and brown fields lying fallow. Turquoise rug with yellow background atop dark brown canvas; windows ambiguous as whether glass of an empty canvas... 
These are the magical "Berkeley Series" named in numbers (22, 38, 44 etc). Colors and even forms are allow--freed--to portray their own coherence and coalesce in a vibrant balance. Shapes abstracted from traditional landscape, hills, fields, blue ocean, deep horizon but to cohere into a painting is the artist's responsibility, desire. A figure against the ground--this is landscape: colors of machinery and civilization against rural cultivation (see Kiran Chandra's "This Place, That Place") and nature--gray burn iron white stiff red fluttering cream purple hint of flesh, lines of roads, paths, fence boundary...themselves borders of the canvas
