Richard Diebenkorn American, 1922-1993
"I guess it was the combination of desert and agriculture that really turned me on, because it has so many things I wanted in my paintings. Of course, the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’—I mean, ...It was all like a flat design—and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid. A bit later, I started photographing through airplane windows, and actually got quite good results."
Diebenkorn used an aerial perspective in many of the abstract and representational works he produced while living in Northern California as a way to express his visual, sensory, and emotional impressions of the unique climate and topography of the Bay Area—a landscape in which he was deeply rooted.
Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon, but moved to San Francisco with his family when he was just two years old. He grew up in Ingleside Terraces, a residential neighborhood at the southern end of the city about two miles from the Pacific Ocean. Diebenkorn completed the majority of his education in the Bay Area, attending Lowell High School in San Francisco; Stanford University in Palo Alto; and the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in San Francisco.
