Robert Irwin's Ocean Park (1960-61) belongs to a small group of paintings Irwin nicknamed his "pick-up sticks" pictures — the last body of work before he set painting aside. Painted a decade before Irwin co-founded the Light and Space movement, it captures the moment he began paring back expressive gesture, testing how reductive a mark could be while still remaining handmade.

Straight, heavily impastoed lines splay across a field of hot mustard yellow, crossing at odd angles in orange, green, red, navy, and cream. Paint builds up thickest at the center, where the lines knot together, and thins toward the edges. Near the top, a scattering of pale, gestural strokes drifts like a flock of birds — the one passage where Irwin's hand loosens.

The title refers to the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, where Irwin kept his studio and reportedly surfed nearby — unrelated to Richard Diebenkorn's better-known series of the same name. Irwin called the straight line "probably the least loaded kind of mark you can make," prefiguring the reductive rigor of his later career. Irwin destroyed most early work and stopped painting by 1970, making this canvas rare; it appeared in the Hirshhorn's 2016 survey All the Rules Will Change.