Explore Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series and transform landscapes through color, geometry, layers, and expressive brushwork.
Join us as we learn new ways to transform the landscape into abstraction and explore the color, geometry, layered surfaces, and expressive brushwork from Diebenkorn’s iconic Ocean Park series.
Discover how Richard Diebenkorn transformed the California landscape into some of the most iconic abstract paintings of the 20th century.
Inspired by Diebenkorn’s abstract landscapes and celebrated Ocean Park series, this painting class explores the space between abstraction and realism through color, structure, line, and layered paint.
Students will study how Diebenkorn simplified the California landscape into geometric shapes, irregular grids, sweeping brushwork, and luminous fields of color—and use those ideas as a starting point for developing their own paintings.
You’ll learn to look beyond the literal landscape and translate what you see into a more abstract visual language. Through painting exercises, sketches, and larger works, you’ll experiment with Diebenkorn-inspired approaches while developing artwork that remains distinctly your own.
Topics Covered:
- Abstracting California landscapes, coastlines, and views
- Creating structure with irregular grids, shapes, and linear contours
- Building luminous color relationships inspired by the Ocean Park series
- Combining flat areas of color with expressive, layered brushwork
- Finding the balance between recognizable imagery and abstractio
Students will leave with 1–2 finished paintings and several exploratory sketches that can become starting points for future work.
More importantly, you’ll gain a new way of seeing the California landscape—how to simplify, edit, layer, and abstract what you observe to create paintings with atmosphere, structure, and personal expression.
Supply List for Students to Bring:
This is a studio class and students will be using their supplies on the first week.
- 1-2 medium sized canvases, wool panels or mixed media paper
- various acrylic colors
- various brushes
- palette knife and palette paper
- quality paper towels like Viva or Blue Shop
- all your paint stash goodies and supplies
Note from Instructor:
Arrive with your canvas(es) painted in either a bright red, orange or fluorescent pink.
