Writerly Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts
If you need a great dose of creative nourishment for your mind, body, and soul, these recent Daily Nourishment contributions from Catherine Ricketts will help!
For more good stuff from Catherine Ricketts, you can pre-order her new book and join us for her Thoughtful Readers Gathering. Learn more about Ricketts, her writing, and work here. Follow her on Instagram at @bycatherinericketts.
Want more nourishment for your writerly mind, body, and soul?
Daily Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts #1 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
On nostalgia: “missing something that wasn’t even ever there”—Catherine Repko
Pause:
Set a timer for two minutes and look the painting Spring’s Harvest by the London-based American artist Catherine Repko.
Prompt:
Next, look at Repko's painting Godhead. Then set a timer for five minutes and write on the following questions:
- What do these paintings make you feel?
- What do these paintings make you remember?
- What do these paintings make you long for?
Practice:
Catherine Repko’s body of work focuses on childhood memories with her three sisters. Much of her work channels feelings of nostalgia, which may at times be, as she puts it, “missing something that wasn’t even ever there.” Call to mind a sibling or childhood friend. This week, write that person a letter describing what you miss, whether it was there or it wasn’t.
Want More?
Watch this video of Catherine Repko in her studio.
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Daily Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts #2 (Here’s a link for the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
Reduce it: “I’m really interested in taking information away and reducing it to a minimal amount of information in a painting, and seeing what then comes into focus. It’s amazing how much possibility is in that.” — Catherine Repko
Pause:
Set a timer for two minutes and look at Catherine Repko’s painting Summers in Connecticut. Notice what comes into focus in this minimalist image.
Prompt:
Write down ten things that you need to do this season. Then cross things out, reducing this list by at least half. What comes into focus?
Practice:
Set an intention for this season based on the exercise above.
Want More?
Explore the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin.
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Daily Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts #3 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
“Stay close to the body.” — Kitsi Watterson
Pause:
Set a timer for two minutes and look at the painting It Was a Season of Change, and In Retrospect, I Knew by Catherine Repko.
Prompt:
Writers can learn from painters like Repko, grounding emotion the imagery of the body—sensation, gesture, touch. In the memoir Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles, the author recalls her grief after being separated from the infant she’d fostered and expected to adopt.
She writes with bodily language as she remembers, “Day after day, my teeth ached. My jaw ached. I walked into a door and a bruise bloomed on my cheek. Somehow I bruised my forearm and both shinbones. My hips hurt. My eyelids swelled. My eyeballs were tender. My back knotted. Eric refused to wash Coco’s clothes. He put them in a bag in his closet. He carried them around.”
Recall a time of intense emotion. Write about how this moment felt in your body.
Practice:
Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and establish a comfortable rhythm of breath. Then scan your body, beginning with your toes and moving slowly to the top of your head, noticing how each part of your body is feeling right now. When you have finished, take three deep breaths and open your eyes.
Want More?
Read all of Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours by Sarah Sentilles.
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Daily Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts #4 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
“Something was snagged, a hundredth of an aspect of somebody.” — Olivia Laing
Pause:
Set at timer for two minutes and look at the painting Honeysuckle by Catherine Repko.
Prompt:
In her book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Lang writes about the difficulty of capturing the essence of a person in a work of art:
“How essential it is to allow the people you depict to keep their secrets, their strangeness and their separateness from you. That’s a kind of moral code I can get behind. Look again at Degas’s scarlet woman. Is she frowning in pain or is she stretching her white neck in ecstasy? It remains opaque. Her body is recorded, and yet she remains unbreached, a private red presence in a public red room.”
Write five sentences characterizing someone very close to you in as much detail as possible.
Practice:
Reread what you’ve written. What has been disclosed? What remains private? Revise as you see fit to characterize more fully or to leave some things opaque.
Want More?
Here, Laing writes about the portraiture of Chantal Joffe: "There’s such a gap between what people look like and who they are. It isn’t easy to catch the essence...perfect objective looking is an impossible act...The painting she made was accurate, it rendered the features, but the person she’d been looking at had evaded her completely. When she told me that story she was excited. Something had been there, in the room. It hadn’t been caught.” Read all of Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
Leslie Jamison also writes about the difficulty of capturing her subjects in writing in the essay collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn.
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Daily Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts #5 (Here’s a link to the SDW Daily Nourishment email.)
The people who shape us: "It just kind of bonded us in a way."—Catherine Repko
Pause:
Watch this video of Catherine Repko in the studio. Then set a timer for five minutes and write on the question, “Who are the people who have most shaped you?”
Prompt:
As the day progresses, notice ways that your thoughts and behaviors are shaped by the people you wrote about.
Practice:
Write an acrostic poem using the name of one of the people who has most shaped you.