Richard Diebenkorn is one of those rare artists who doggedly pursued his own interest in artistic style and subject matter regardless of what the market dictated or fashion expected of him as an artist. At various times in his career he worked with either landscape or figuration. Sometimes he did both simultaneously with very subtle differences. The crossed legs of a model seated in a chair become intersecting roads in a landscape.
Shoulders become mountains and facial features meld into ambiguous aspects of terrain.
The last print project Diebenkorn completed comprised a group of ten untitled lithographs. The artist designated eight images as a suite and the other two are related images. As with many of the works created in the last years of his life, these prints suggest that the artist was having a look back at the images that occupied his artistic career. In his 1991 etching titled Flotsam , we see the artist recollect images as diverse as the club and spade images from the 1980s, the placid geometric works of the 1970s, the figures, scissors, and related still life elements from the 1960s, and the aerial views seen from his first civilian airplane trip in 1951. This voyage across the desert area between Albuquerque and San Francisco inspired many of the artist's long-held stylistic tendencies.