A friend’s happenstance run-in with painter Brooke Pickett during a pit stop on Magazine Street led me to a gallery opening at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans last weekend.  The paintings alone reminded me of Philip Guston’s work, so I wasn’t surprised when I read in Pickett’s interview that he was important to her as an artist.  But as I walked into and around the gallery as the sun was setting, it was Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series compositions that came to mind; the light was changing the work on the wall even after it was finished.  The way the light hit the windows into Diebenkorn’s studio largely informed his compositions (this video shows him sitting in his studio like it is a gallery).  The image of my friend Jillian taking in her old schoolmate’s paintings is my humble photographic homage to Diebenkorn, because why can’t the gallery be a studio, too?