Guy Diehl gained the photorealist label in the 1970s when he created a series of paintings and watercolors based on the human figure by the swimming pool and seaside. He would toil over the details of concrete surface texture and each grain of sand in these meticulously complete artworks. At the time, he was clearly under the tutelage of his graduate school mentors, Richard McLean, and Robert Bechtle, both noted photorealist painters who came to prominence in that era. 

But it was several encounters with Gordon Cook’s still life paintings in the early ‘80s (at the Charles Campbell Gallery, Oakland Museum, and at Modesto Lanzone’s Ghirardelli Square restaurant of San Francisco) along with the exposure to Susan Hauptman’s charcoal still life drawings (introduced to him via gallerist Jeremy Stone), that made Diehl want to turn exclusively toward still life. This subject matter shift coincided with a desire to exercise more restraint in his painting technique. Cook’s work, in particular, caused Diehl to reflect upon the limits of detail, concluding that less might, in fact, be more. 

By this point, Diehl was a full-time artist with a part-time teaching post. He had exhausted the creative challenges posed by the Swimming Pool series. He had already gradually been moving in the direction of still life as he eliminated the figure from those compositions altogether. Through Cook, Diehl also discovered the Italian still life painter Georgio Morandi, whose unassuming renderings of bottles and jars he admired for their spare color and powerful reductive compositions.     

Matt Gonzalez