Richard Diebenkorn (Born in 1922) was born in Portland, Oregon. When he was two years old, his family moved to San Francisco, California. From the age of 4 or 5 he was continually drawing. At the age of 18, he entered Stanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors, Professor Victor Arnautoff, a muralist, and Daniel Mendelowitz. Professor Victor guided him in classical formal discipline with oil paint. Both Diebenkorn and Mendelowitz had a passion for the work of Hopper Edward. The influence of Edward on Diebenkorn's representational work can easily be seen. In 1943 Diebenkorn was enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and he served until 1945. In the late 1940s and early 1950, the artist lived and worked in various places: Berkeley, California, Urbana, Illinois, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Woodstock, New York, and in San Francisco and Sausalito. Diebenkorn developed his own style of abstract expressionist painting.
During the early 1950s, through his seductive surfaces and colors and superb sense of balance between abstraction and figuration - and between planes - Diebenkorn came to define the California school of Abstract Expressionism. The artist moved back and forth between making figural and abstract paintings throughout his life as an artist. Diebenkorn was noted for developing a unique form of Northern California realism during the 1950s through the 1960s – this is now referred to as the Bay Area Figurative School. In the mid-1950s, he had become an important figurative painter and participated in a renaissance of figurative painting together with other artists such as James Weeks, David Park, Henry Villierme, Elmer Bischoff, etc.
