Daily Nourishment + Upcoming Online Christmastide Retreat with Lauren F. Winner
If you need a great dose of creative nourishment for your mind, body, and soul, Lauren F. Winner’s Daily Nourishment contributions for this week will help!
I’ll try to add the daily Pause/Prompt/Practice by noon each day this week through Friday.
And, if you want a few hours to slow down and receive good things from this Christmas Season, join us for an Online Christmastide Retreat with Lauren Winner. All are welcome. Learn more and register here. The retreat is only $49.
Daily Nourishment with Lauren F. Winner for Monday, December 11, 2023 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
A Note from Lauren: Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
Pause:
Set a timer for three minutes. Then turn your gaze to Brown’s Maid in a Landscape (2021).
Where does your eye land? What does your body feel as you keep you gaze on this painting? What do you see?
If, after three minutes, you wish to write in response to the experience of sitting with Maid in a Landscape, do so.
Prompt:
Cecily Brown is a painter who returns and repeats. “The older I get, the more I go back to the same motifs or subjects over and over….[T]here’s nearly always something more to be looked at in a subject,” she’s said.
For two minutes, brainstorm the subjects and motifs you have returned to.
Practice:
Circle one returned-to motif that appears in your brainstormed list. Pause reading this till you’ve done that.
Now, write for six minutes: what more is there to be looked at in the subject your circled?
Want More?
Watch this video. How might you adapt Brown’s insights into her artistic practice and take them into your writing life?
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Daily Nourishment with Lauren F. Winner for Tuesday, December 12, 2023 (Here’s a link for the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
A Note from Lauren: Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
For today’s Pause/Prompt/Practice, please have at the ready a piece of writing you finished a week, month, year, or decade ago. It could be a paragraph or poem; it could be an essay, story, or book. It could be a letter, email, or recipe.
Pause:
Speaking to The Guardian in 2009 – the feature is pleasingly titled “Cecily Brown: I take things too far when painting” — Brown said “once I stopped caring quite so much about where I fitted in, and whether it made any sense to be painting, I started getting more and more absorbed in it.”
Have you come to the place in your life where you don’t care quite so much about whether, or if, you fit in? If so, how did you get to that place? If not, does the idea of arriving there appeal to you? Frighten you? Intrigue you?
Prompt:
In the same feature, Brown goes on to say “I've discovered that the more I paint, the more I want to paint. The longer I go on doing it, the more I have to say and do. You pose a certain set of questions in one group of paintings and you want to answer them in the next. One body of work leads naturally to the next - you sort of feed off yourself. It's a question of accepting the limits of painting and trying to be as imaginative and expansive as possible within those boundaries.”
I do not know if Brown is religious, but the notion of creativity and expansiveness being decidedly possible inside a set of limits that one has accepted sounds to me like an insight into liturgy. Perhaps also an insight into marriage? Into embodiment? When have you experienced finding expansiveness within a set of limits?
Practice:
Brown’s notion that one group of paintings poses a “set of questions” that “you want to answer…in the next” suggests that making art is wonderfully self-generating.
Look over a piece of writing that you have finished. What question or questions yet unanswered does the piece pose? Set a timer for ten minutes. Then pen (or keyboard) in hand, begin addressing the question or questions.
Want More?
Brown’s Triumph of the Vanities II (2018) from the Brooklyn Museum
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Daily Nourishment with Lauren F. Winner for Wednesday, December 13, 2023 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
A Note from Lauren: Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
Pause:
Set a timer for two minutes. Gaze at Untitled (2005), which, like much of Brown’s work, is concerned with death.
Prompt:
Untitled is an entry in the long painterly tradition known as ‘vanitas’ paintings — paintings, often featuring skulls, that focus the reader’s attention on mortality, and the brevity of life. As poet Lisa Russ Spaar has summarized, these vanitas painting “captures objects that represent life’s transience and mutability: skulls, rotting fruit, decaying flowers, un-sprung musical instruments, often seized by the painter in the very act of vanishing.”
Here’s a vanitas by Cezanne and one by Philippe de Champaigne.
Set a timer for three minutes. Brainstorm the objects you’d include if you were painting a vanitas.
Practice:
About vanitas paintings, art historian Paul Barolsky has written:
“we are quick to dwell too narrowly on the twin themes of vanity and death when we behold pictures …representing skulls, clocks, burning candles, and bubbles, even though we take delight in such pictures. If these paintings suggest the passing of worldly pleasures and the finality of death, they also abundantly celebrate the pleasures of art and life….We take pleasure in the objects before us: the elegant, tall, wine-filled drinking glass, the nearby pitcher with a trumpeting putto at the top, the elaborate glass rising upon an ornate stand all of which gleam against the darkness of the background. We delight in the promise of food and drink, above all, the succulent fruit presented in lovely bowls.” Vanitas paintings, contends Barolsky, “were painted to be hung on walls to be, dare I say, enjoyed; and, yes, if they prompted the beholder to contemplate mortality, they also most emphatically beautified, enhanced, the lives of those who lived in spaces adorned by such pleasing illusions, by such pleasurable demonstrations of artistic skill in the representation of life's pleasures. When in overly moralized interpretations we reduce such paintings to pictorial sermons on vanity, we fail to grasp adequately the ambiguous wholeness of these images, which prompt us to reflect not upon mortality alone, but upon the ways in which life and death define each other.”
Gaze at one of the vanitas paintings above and write in response to it, for six minutes, in a key of mortality; then stand up and stretch, or walk around the block, and return to the painting, and write in response, for six minutes, in a key of pleasure.
Want More?
Here’s a poem about loss and living by Lisa Russ Spaar. Read it at least twice - once silently, and once aloud.
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Daily Nourishment with Lauren F. Winner for Thursday, December 14, 2023 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
A Note from Lauren: Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
Pause:
Gaze for five minutes at “Vanity Shipwreck” (2021-22), which depicts a woman a a dressing table gazing at her own life. Let your breath slow while you gaze.
Prompt:
Reviewing Brown’s recent show at the Met, New York Times critic Roberta Smith recalls trashing a show of Brown’s almost a quarter of a century ago. “Back then,” rights Smith, “her paint textures, often embedded with embracing figures in flagrante delicto, or thereabouts, struck me as pointlessly messy, gratuitously provocative, amateurish in their mixes of abstraction and representation — and made to sell, which they did.” But “Unexpectedly, my [negative] review nagged at me.”
Over the years, Smith’s estimation of Brown began to change: “Brown has said in interviews that she wanted her paintings to make people slow down and experience the fullness and richness of her work. Her masses of brushwork harbor small images, some intentional, some in the eye of the beholder. What I would come to see is that they are much more deliberate than they first appeared to me. In retrospect I realized I had not let my looking be slowed and had taken the unusual complexities of Brown’s art as simple busyness.” The recent show at the Met, which Smith praised unreservedly, heralded a complete reversal of Smith’s earlier judgment. “I could argue that Cecily Brown has become a better painter. But really it’s the often mysterious expansion of my own taste that we’re talking about here.”
What allows you to let your looking be slowed?
Practice:
When has your taste expanded? When have you reversed a judgment or opinion—of a work of art or literary text? Of a situation in the world? Of yourself?
Write for six minutes.
Want More?
Read “I Was Wrong about Cecily Brown”
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Daily Nourishment with Lauren F. Winner for Friday, December 15, 2023 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
A Note from Lauren: Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wound down its exhibit of 50 pieces — paintings, drawings — by Cecily Brown. Our Pauses, Prompts, and Practices this week all take Brown’s art, and her insight into art, as our jumping off point.
Pause:
A (thoroughly delightful) 2016 profile in Financial Times quotes Brown as saying “Painting has been hard since photography because there’s no real reason to do it. [Francis] Bacon said the hardest thing is knowing what to paint. If you don’t have the physical urge, you can talk yourself out of it intellectually before you even pick up a brush. I don’t think in any other way. I have to be in the studio, I don’t have ideas unless I’m physically doing it.”
Have you ever felt a physical urge to write? Close your eyes and recall your most satisfying moments of writing: What physicality was part and parcel of the writing? Where are you? Are you writing with pen, pencil, or keyboard? Are you standing or sitting?
Prompt:
Brown has said “One of the things I love about painting is its ability to embody more than once thing at once….[S]omething will be both a hunt and a shipwreck in a garden with the nude.” Take a few minutes write something that is both a hunt and a shipwreck in a garden with the nude.
Practice:
Brainstorm a list of ten situations in which more than one person find themselves outdoors in the daytime (four people are at a tennis court playing doubles; a father and son are weeding the vegetable beds…). Stop reading this “practice” till you’ve brainstormed that list of ten.
Now, brainstorm a list of ten situations in which more than one person find themselves outdoors at night (a college pair is making love in a graveyard; a gaggle of kids is trick-or-treating…). Stop reading this “practice” till you’ve brainstormed that list of ten.
Now, pick one item from each list and, in the spirit of Brown’s “something will be both a hunt and a shipwreck,” write a poem or a few paragraphs — a sketch — in which your two items are somehow the same.
Want More?
Read the whole Financial Times profile here. (Subscription required.)
And:
Brown’s mother, Shena Mackay, is a novelist. Brown has said “My painting is really close to my mum’s writing. The very visual nature of her writing, its surreal nature, had a big influence on me.”
Read this by Mackay, and write in response to it. Is there a writer—or a painter—who has had “a big influence” on your writing? Write for a few minutes toward a deeper understanding of that influence.