Clip: Season 11 Episode 2 | 1m 20s | Video has closed captioning.
Artist Tauba Auerbach is in their studio in New York City, creating drawings with a “knit structure,” sequences of a single gesture woven together on the page, challenging themselves to modify the rules without lifting the marker or draw from a specific part of their body. The trance-like state achieved in these intuitive and spontaneous drawings is the ideal space for the artist to think.
Aired: 06/23/23
I do a lot of drawings that involve this knit structure, and I often figuratively lose the thread when I'm drawing, I lose the rhythm.
They're really fast, spontaneous work.
And then sometimes, I get kind of fixated on completing one long connected form that has a set of changing rules to it.
It's almost impossible not to go into a kind of trance state.
♪Auerglass playing Often, when I'm drawing, I ask myself, "Can I move from the wrist?
Can I move from the fingers, from the elbow, from the shoulder, from the center of my chest?"
♪♪ I feel like a better thinker when I draw.
There's so much wisdom embedded in techniques and procedures for crafts passed from person to person.
I think that if you're a person who marbles end papers for books for decades, you know just as much about viscosity and flow as a scientist.
But you know it through your fingertips and your senses, and in a different way.
♪♪
Educators' Guide
Learn more about the artists featured in "Everyday Icons," see discussion questions, a glossary, and more.
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