RICHARD DIEBENKORN: Sketchbooks - A Portable Studio

RICHARD DIEBENKORN: Sketchbooks - A Portable Studio

✏ Live Online Class: Sat, 24th January 2026, 2pm GMT

✏ With Dr Mary Clare McKinley from the artist’s Foundation and artist and educator, Frances Stanfield from London Drawing Group

✏ Pay What You Can

✏ + 14 Days Recording Access

Please book via eventbrite on a browser, not the Eventbrite app. Email us if you need help!

This online workshop offers a rare blend of archival access, expert insight, and practical drawing exploration.

"He just never stopped looking at the world and drawing it. The sheer enormity of it, the sheer variety of it, the sheer freshness of some of the things he just stored away and never showed." – Jane Livingston, co-editor of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 2016)

Join us for a unique online drawing class celebrating the drawing practice of American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993). Created in collaboration with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, this session offers an extraordinary opportunity to see and learn from highlights drawn from over a thousand pages of the artist’s sketchbooks alongside key works from his six-decade career.

Throughout his life, Diebenkorn treated his sketchbooks as what he called a “portable studio”- a private space to test ideas, capture fleeting moments, and refine his visual thinking. Containing more than 1,045 drawings that span the breadth of his practice, they reveal everything from quick studies of everyday life to the structured compositional sketches that would later become the celebrated Ocean Park series.

After his death in 1993, Diebenkorn’s wife, Phyllis, safeguarded these books for over twenty years before gifting the entire collection, along with tucked-away ephemera, to Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, where they were digitised and made publicly accessible for the first time. The result is a wonderfully personal record of an artist in constant dialogue with his surroundings, forever experimenting and observing.

With insight and commentary and guided drawing exercises from Dr Mary Clare McKinley of the Diebenkorn Foundation, and LDG's Frances Stanfield, this session invites participants to explore how sketchbooks can become spaces for curiosity, planning, and play. Together we’ll look closely at Diebenkorn’s methods, his use of line, shape, composition and rhythm, whilst creating our own drawings inspired by his process of continuous observation and repetition.

As always, this class is open to absolutely everyone regardless of your financial situation and whether you’re picking up a pencil for the first time, returning to your practice or just want to watch and listen.

Suggested Materials

We suggest the materials below but you can join with anything you have. You can always invest / search for new materials after the class and draw along again with the recording access.

• Paper/sketchbook
• Pencil
• Any other drawing material you would like to use

This class is suitable for all levels! Practicing artists and complete beginnners a-like.

Everyone is welcome to join this Pay-What-You-Can class

Tickets:

We suggest an amount of £20. However, we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we may continue to offer our sessions on this basis whilst also giving our tutors a sustainable wage.

There is also a ticket option to "Pay It Forward" to support us and our students! We offer classes for free to those who can't afford the minimum amount (If this is you please email us to join for free). This continues to ensure our classes are available to everyone!

Once booked:

You will receive a confirmation email and be able to access information on how to join the event via your eventbrite "Online Event Page" You can access this by signing into eventbrite or creating an account using the email address that you booked with.

In the Class:

You can't be seen or heard in our classes, your audio and video are automatically turned off and there's no way these can be turned on. You can talk to us and others in the class in the chat box!

We love to see your drawings or anything else our classes inspire! You can share them with us by tagging us on instagram (@londondrawinggroup) or emailing us if you don't have socials.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BOOK VIA THE EVENTBRITE PHONE APP?!

We have been in touch with Eventbrite, and they have informed us that currently you cannot book tickets to online events in their app. It's very frustrating and we have been assured they are working on a solution. In the meantime, we recommend that you book tickets to our events outside of the iOS app - either via a web browser or a desktop. If you book our classes regularly we recommend deleting the eventbrite App.

IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS OR QUESTIONS PLEASE EMAIL :

hello@londondrawinggroup.com

And that's it!

We're really looking forward to you joining us.

Love,

LDG

Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993), Untitled from Sketchbook #8, page 60, 1943-1993. Graphite on paper. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Gift of Phyllis Diebenkorn, 2014.8.62 © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation