Many drawings from 1964 were as quieter counterpoints to one of the artist’s main preoccupations in the mid-1960s–still life composition. In this period Diebenkorn continued to experiment with depicting the human figure, as well as absorbing and expressing landscape subjects. Moreover, in all of these genres, he was continually distilling his visual ideas into a personal language of proto-abstraction. Yet in the mid-1960s perhaps no genre was more compelling to the artist than that of the still life. Connected to this focus on still life was his preoccupation with the depiction of interior space, peopled and unpeopled.

– Jane Livingston's Catalogue essay for Volume 3 of the Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné

The tabletop still life didn’t interest Diebenkorn enough for him to explore it as exhaustively as he did the (mostly female) human figure. But as one of the depictive traditions he honored throughout his artistic career, it served him well as an opportunity to refine his command of spatial illusionism in both drawing and painting. He often reverted from the full-frame tabletop still life to a composition that opened up, however subtly or offhandedly, into deeper space.

– Jane Livingston's Catalogue essay for Volume 3 of the Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné

By the mid-1960s, if not earlier, Diebenkorn’s works on paper operated in a self declared universe separate from his works on canvas. In his early abstract period, his drawings and paintings had been somewhat related compositionally–or at least one felt a porousness of experimentation between all of his materials and the scales in which he worked. When he turned to representation, however, he established a distinct counterpoint between the two physical mediums that would intensify over the years. Certain works on paper show the artist’s thought process at its most original, paralleling–rather than repeating or prefiguring–the language worked out in the oils on canvas. 

– Jane Livingston's Catalogue essay for Volume 3 of the Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné