Daily Nourishment for January 11: It Isn’t Easy
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 50 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
“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
Workshops, Gatherings, & Resources
The Flourish Anyway Creative Soul Series with Workshop Local (with online classes and in-person classes in Birmingham)
Class 1: Flourish Anyway with Wintry Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats
Class 2: Flourish Anyway with a Sustainable Retreat Practice
Class 3: Flourish Anyway with Lessons from Iconic Birmingham Writers, Artists, & Musicians
Flourish Anyway with Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Catherine Ricketts.
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