  💚 It isn’t easy

Email Read Time: 55 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10-15 minutes

Announcements:

—This week’s Daily Nourishment Pauses, Prompts, and Practices are new contributions from Catherine Ricketts. (Thanks, Cat!) Cat is one of our SDW Fellows for 2024, so you’ll be seeing her words here often this year. She’s also one of our speakers for the 1/27/2024 Seminar for Motherhood and Writing. Learn more here.

—We have SDW Co-Writing today from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. CT. Learn more here.

—All of our Co-Writing Invocations and Blessings this month are from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley. This book comes out on January 15, and it is phenomenal. One way to pre-order is to sign up for the paid Thoughtful Readers Gathering with Cole Arthur Riley on January 21. There’s also a free option. Everyone is welcome!

—Thanks so much for subscribing to SDW Daily Nourishment.

“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

Catherine Ricketts

Catherine Ricketts writes about the arts, grief, joy, and spirituality. Her book about motherhood and artistic practice, titled The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity, comes out April 16 and is available for preorder here and via our Thoughtful Readers Gathering scheduled for May 5.

Find her on Instagram at @bycatherinericketts.

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