In Memoriam Sister Wendy

Two days ago I spent some of my Boxing Day watching Sister Wendy art documentaries from the 90s, which have held up extremely well. (That's the thing about the public television sort of production values, which are never high: when the focus of the program is its content, rather than its medium, the content endures. Consider Julia Child, for example.) I was saddened to hear, later in the day, that she has died. In fact, I must have been watching one of her shows as she was dying, which would strike many people — though not a member of a religious order, I suspect — as a morbid thought.

If you've not encountered her documentaries, I recommend them highly. Sister Wendy is the best sort of person that the Christian tradition can produce: a genuinely humane person, in the truest sense of the word. The Christian life, even the consecrated religious life, should not be a retreat from the reality of lived human experience. I speak, frankly, of sex: Sister Wendy looked at it — and there is so much of it, in the history of art — with an honest and uncompromising eye. (Downplay or retreat from sex in art and you end up sublimating it like Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing quiveringly of bathing boys. Such art, wrought from curdled sexuality, makes me nauseous.) She was a keen observer, and not afraid to look things square in the face.

I'll refer you to an essay she wrote, "The Art of Looking at Art".

And here is one of my favorite Sister Wendy bits, from her Story of Painting: