Over the course of two years, between 1981 and 1982, in a break from the rectilinear geometry of his large Ocean Park canvases, Diebenkorn dealt directly with clubs and spades, as theme and variation, in a sizable group of drawings and prints. Diebenkorn was fascinated with the figures of clubs and spades from the time of his childhood, when he painted them as emblems of heraldic devices on homemade shields. Occasionally, he included them in his early abstract paintings and drawings of the 1950s and 1960s. "I had always used these signs in my work almost from my beginnings, but always peripherally, incidentally, and perhaps whimsically" [R. Diebenkorn, quoted from John Elderfield, "Leaving Ocean Park", The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, New York, 1997, p. 112]. In two printmaking sessions at Crown Point Press, April 13-21, 1981 and May 5-20, 1982, the artist produced fifteen prints with clubs and spades as singular motifs. The forms are iconic in these prints, enlarged to a monumental scale within the printing plate, often crowding the image space. Clubs and spades mutate into trees, towers, or merge to form hybrids. Spades are bloated and bulbous, each containing a flowerlike club form. (edited from Karin Breuer, Richard Diebenkorn: Clubs and Spades [exhibition brochure], San Francisco, 2002).