Out-of-towners and guide books like to euphemistically describe San Francisco as "colorful". By that they might mean perverse, strange, demented or just a little more intense than your typical stopover in Des Moines. But the thing is that a city is a city, and living in one means a fair amount of grey on grey action. And even though we may live in the most colorful city in the world, all that grey can really start to get to you.

That's why when it comes to art exhibitions, my natural preference is always towards large oily canvases that blast my brain open with saturated color and leave my jaw hanging slack (no offensive, thoughtful black and white photography shows). The de Young's new retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's work does just that, with the added bonus of highlighting a true hometown art hero. Diebs made his home here from an early age, attending venerable schools like Lowell, Stanford and Cal, and setting up shop all over the Bay Area.

The works featured here showcase a prolific period between 1953 and 1966, so-called the "Berkeley Years" for the time Diebenkorn spent in his backyard East Bay studio, where he painted pieces in what would become known as the San Francisco school of abstract expressionism (think natural theme, light and shadow and spartan, airy spaces).

Diebenkorn's paintings range from the representational to the abstract but are bound by a cohesion of strokes and color sensibility: his abstracted aerial landscapes and figures breathe in sage, periwinkle, oranges and salty ocean tones, with pops of canary yellow and pockets of muddy darkness.

While the show is extensive, the nature of the work means you won't leave feeling drained and depleted, but refreshed, revitalized and a little bit less grey.

Richard Diebenkorn, The Berkeley Years
June 22 - September 29
de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr.
(415) 750-3600