Daily Nourishment for August 29, 2024: What It Meant to Us with Lauren Winner
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 60 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10 minutes
Interviewer: What is art for?
Kara Walker: Figuring it out.
Pause.
For one minute, gaze at Bo Bartlett’s “Dominion.” If you are looking via a small screen, enlarge and focus on the bear’s face; then enlarge and focus on the claw furthest away from the bear’s face, the patch of ice on which the claw rests, and the water surrounding the ice.
Prompt.
In March 2022, The New York Times ran a piece titled “How Should Art Reckon with Climate Change?” The article quoted a 2005 op-ed by Bill McKibben:
[In 2005], the environmentalist Bill McKibben…railed against the culture’s perceived indifference. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he wrote in an op-ed for Grist. “Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS … which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.” For future generations looking back on the present, “the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.”
Return to Bartlett’s “Dominion.” Sit with it for 8 minutes — long enough to get bored and twitchy, and long enough to return from the twitch to the image. What does the painting say to you? Write in response, if you wish.
Practice.
“Dominion,” which is 82 x 100 inches, hangs prominently in the Asheville Art Museum — it interrupts you as you walk up the stairs to the museum’s main galleries, and whenever I am there, I stop and take some time with it, rarely having the same thoughts or feelings as I did the time before.
This week, go to a local museum, if you live near one, and identify a piece of art that is on relatively-permanent display with which you might develop a relationship over time. Or, identify a piece of art in your home that you often pass by but rarely look at with focus and intention, and pass 15 minutes gazing at it. Then make a date, written in your calendar, to look again in one month.
Want More?
Two artists who respond to McKibben’s cri de coeur:
Xavier Cortada
Allison Janae Hamilton
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Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
—The August Co-Writing Schedule is live.
—Spiritual Direction for Writers® + Enneagram for Creativity Gathering will take place on Friday, September 27th and Saturday, September 28th. Recordings will be available if you can’t join us live. You can register here.
—August 31— Online Revision Stations Designed by Lauren F. Winner
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner.
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