TACITA DEAN: One day I was driving down Sunset Boulevard and there was this unbelievably beautiful cloud blossoming at the end of the road on Sunset Boulevard, and I really wanted to try doing a drawing. 

NARRATOR: Tacita Dean made this when she was an artist in residence at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.  

DEAN: We know LA through cinema, and cinema is just, like, a blue backdrop. So I was staggered by the clouds, because they are different. The skies are bigger, and they’re less connected to rain and weather, they’re connected to wind and aeronautics, probably. 

The artist office at the Getty is called H540. And that was a cloud I saw at the Getty, from up at the top. 

It is just chalk, it’s just school board chalk. And it’s just blackboard paint. That’s all it is. There’s nothing else. It was all drawn and then rubbed out. The erasure, the marks are as important as the drawing itself.