Thinking with our hands: a story of drawing | Louise Despont | TEDxUbud

A talk about how ideas flow from the brain and into the hands of an artist, and why we should all be using our hands more to create. Louise Despont touches on what the loss of handwriting might mean for us all, how to cultivate a creative practice, and shares how her detailed drawing process has evolved.

In this age of digital creation, Louise is definitely an outlier as she works with her hands and often her whole body to create her drawings. She prefers to draw on ledger paper with pre-existing lines, resulting in an almost devotional object comprised of dense colors and shapes.
Louise Despont lives and works in Bali and New York City. Since discovering the potential of working with pencil and architectural stencils on paper, she has adopted an intuitive process in which she allows her drawings to develop as she creates them, resulting in an almost devotional object comprised of dense colors and shapes. Preferring to draw on ledger paper with pre-existing lines, Louise sees a parallel between the mathematical accounting the paper was designed to organize and the way that her practice is an accounting of her time spent.

Her work has been presented internationally in public and private venues including; the Drawing Center, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Museum of Arts and Design, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Petit Palais Paris, VI, VII Oslo, IMO Copenhagen and Galerie Isa, Mumbai. Public collections of her work are found in MoMA New York, High Museum Atlanta and the RISD Museum. Louise is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx