💚 The brevity of life

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Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes

Announcements:

—This week’s Daily Nourishment Pauses, Prompts, and Practices are brand new contributions from Lauren F. Winner. (Thanks, Lauren!)

—AND Lauren will be leading an online Christmastide Retreat on Wednesday, 12/27 & Monday, 1/1. Both retreats are identical. Anyone who registers can attend one retreat or both. Cost is $49 with SDW Members receiving 50% off. Learn more and register here.

—Did you see the announcement about the online Thoughtful Readers Gatherings featuring Cole Arthur Riley, Crystal Wilkinson, Kaveh Akbar, Catherine Ricketts, Pádraig Ó Tuama, and more great authors?

—Our next SDW Co-Writing Session is on Friday from 8 a.m.-noon CT. Learn more and register here. SDW Members receive 50% off.

—Thanks so much for subscribing to SDW Daily Nourishment!

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.

Lauren Winner

Lauren F. Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, and most recently, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin.

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