Copper, Paint, Strings: Three Ways of Thinking With Your Hands

In every craft there is a point at which the tool stops being an object. Before it, you correct yourself constantly: set down too deep, pulled too fast, hand cramping. After it, you are no longer thinking about the burin but about the line you want. Getting there takes a long time, it is unglamorous, and there is no shortcut.

With the engraver you can see that point in his shoulders. They are still. The work happens in the fingers and the wrist; the rest of the body just holds steady. The copper gives off a fine, dry sound, closer to paper than to metal. People standing next to it for the first time are usually surprised by how quiet the whole thing is.

In conversations about art, repetition has a bad name. It is taken to be what's left over once the ideas have run out. In the workshops and rehearsal rooms we film in, the opposite is true: repetition is the condition under which an idea can be carried out at all. If your brushstroke isn't reliable, you don't get to choose one.

The painter whose studio we visited works on the canvas with her bare hands. Paint inevitably ends up on her as well — forearms, shoulders, hair. She washes it off in the evening, not out of carelessness but because any interruption pulls her out of the picture. The marks are a fairly precise record of how long she has been on her feet.

On stage the same process simply runs faster. A chord change someone has practised ten thousand times costs him no attention at all — and that freed-up attention goes to the person beside him holding the pulse. You can only play with others once you are done wrestling with your own instrument.

That is why the workshop and the concert hall sit in the same channel here. It is the same thing: repeating a movement until it belongs to you, and then saying something with it.