Richard Diebenkorn - The Ocean Park

Today I visited the Modern Museum of Fort Worth and discovered that Richard Diebenkorn had an exhibition showing. The entire second floor save a couple of hallways were covered in his collection titled The Ocean Park. He began this series in 1967 and from what I know this was abstract that was completely different from his earlier abstract work. He worked on this for over 25 years and produced about 140 paintings. This has become his most famous body of work. At first I wasn't very found of this work. Abstract is something that takes a while for me to warm up to and this was no different. However, I was immediately attracted to his use of color and shape. He made the paintings look like stained glass, to me, and I was very fond of that. His larger paintings, while beautiful, were not as inviting to me as the smaller ones. He had done this series of cigar box lids that I literally wanted to buy on the spot. They were the same abstract paintings but on cigar boxes! You could still see some of the design through the paint and it was just absolutely beautiful. The more I looked at his work the more I fell in love with it and I'll have to add him down as one of my favorites now. I was not allowed to take pictures of the exhibition but I did find some pictures of his paintings on Google.