💚 When your taste expands

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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.

—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.

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”

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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