Slow Down With Art

Around lunchtime on a chilly Tuesday in February, I made my way to the Princeton University Art Museum for Rev. Brittany Longsdorf’s debut session of Visio Divina, an art meditation practice that she brought from her former position at Bates College in Maine all the way to Princeton, New Jersey.

I had no idea what Visio Divina was, and the last time I’d been in the Art Museum was at 1 a.m. on Halloween—its opening day, a fever dream of students in banana suits and construction worker costumes wandering around the newly opened galleries. At least, I thought, this event was getting me to visit the Art Museum again. It was such a privilege to have a newly constructed Art Museum at my doorstep (and one ranked among TIME’s World’s Greatest Places of 2026 at that!).  

We met in the Creativity Labs, a space on the first floor of the Art Museum. Two rooms are filled with free art supplies and are open to the public. My immediate thought upon learning this was that I needed to drag my roommates back here once I finished my thesis, so we could color away the rest of our senior year in a blissful return to childhood creativity. For now though it was our staging area for Visio Divina.

Brittany greeted us and handed out sheets of paper detailing Visio Divina’s process, which comprises five easy steps that would all take place in twenty minutes. I’ve paraphrased them here: 1) Choose an artwork; 2) Choose a small spot on the artwork and don’t let your eyes wander from it; 3) Let your gaze wander across the image; 4) Think about what this artwork is trying to tell you; and 5) Offer a silent blessing or prayer of thanks. 

Brittany assured us that she would be with us throughout the meditation, ringing a bell every few minutes to move us from one step to the next. She warned us though that we might feel a little silly, since we were doing this out in public, during the open hours of the Art Museum. Each of us grabbed a stool and sat down in front of a painting for twenty minutes while other visitors passed through the galleries like fish in a gently running stream.

It did feel a little weird at first, but once my self-consciousness faded, there was a kind of thrill in doing something different from what everyone else was doing. You could feel other people in the gallery slow down around you as they wondered why you were staring at one painting for so long, and what could possibly be so interesting about it.

The painting I chose was of ruins of a medieval-esque fort on a hill. In the first ten minutes, when I could focus only on one small spot, I chose the liminal space between the branches of a tree. It narrowed down the sky and horizon to a small slice between tree branches. Though it was a little uncomfortable to stare at one small portion of the painting for so long, I saw so much in that small portion I’d selected that once it was time to let my gaze move around, I felt immediately that the remaining ten minutes would not be nearly enough to know the rest of the painting as intimately as I did that one spot.

Still, I got to know this painting better than I’d ever gotten to know a painting before. I saw a donkey next to a fallen tree trunk that could’ve stayed in the shadows. I felt the movement of the travelers climbing up the hill to the fort and noticed the exhaustion in their postures. The painting came alive for me in a way that no painting ever had. And I realized this was not because other paintings weren’t alive, but because I’d never looked at any one work of art for long enough.

In the fourth step of Visio Divina, I reflected on what this painting was trying to tell me. I began thinking it was delivering a lesson on appreciating beauty in the arduous climbs of life (like, say, a senior thesis . . . ). The voyagers were weary from their travels, but the sky was magnificent, and the golden-hour light stuck the crumbling dirt on the hills just right, giving off a dusky orange glow. To me the lesson was this: The journey is tiring, but when we reach the peak, the horizon stretches farther and wider than we ever could have imagined.

As I prayed and offered my gratitude at the end, I felt truly moved by this experience of looking at art in a new, slow way. It was like seeing the artwork as a vehicle for God or the universe—the painting I am called to contemplate will always be the one that has just the right lesson for me at just the right time. 

I came away feeling that Visio Divina could benefit many other Princeton students, whether they are at the start of their Princeton careers or at the end of them like myself. I highly encourage other students to try!  

Please reach out to Rev. Brittany Longsdorf to be added to the Visio Divina email list.