Resuscitation

breathing life into our food, our work and our lives

A few weeks ago I found myself wedged in the middle of the best conversation. It took place at the end of a book launch,¹ in that sweet time of the night when ice has broken, the author has spoken and everyone sinks into good conversations.

To my left is my friend Gillian² - an artist and a therapist (and sometimes my art therapist) who, for style context, is wearing thrifted camouflage trousers upcycled and altered by her teenage son and a metal wolf head for a belt buckle. To my right is Jason³, a Toronto based artist who makes ink from urban life - spring blossoms, rusty nails or sumac berries from the lane behind a row of houses. I’ve wanted to talk to Jason for a long time. I’m curious about his work, his newsletter, and the confident strokes of ink he makes across paper that marble and bleed in the most beautiful ways. Jason looks down and scratches the back of his head. He is quiet, I’m not sure he wants to chat with a new person. But he knows Gillian. So I too scratch my head, then ask - have you ever collaborated with another artist on the same piece of art?

I don’t know where this question came from. Perhaps from the idea that the two work in similar ways - they sit down with paper, ink, paint and brushes and see where the work takes them. Gillian finds faces in the brush strokes, human forms, breasts, high heels, owls, monsters. I don’t know what Jason sees, but I do know he isn’t sitting down to paint a still life. His work feels organic.

Gillian takes over. “Jason, do you have any pieces of art languishing at home? A piece that is bothering you, that you don’t know what to do with?”

“Yes!” he cries. “So many!”

We talk about facing dead-ends in our work and not knowing where to turn. About the need to pivot. To breathe new life into something, something that wasn’t going anywhere. I think of recipes. How I often make something like, say, a bolognese, and my husband passes by, samples a spoonful and says, if you wants a kick, I’d add Slap Ya Mama.⁴ Or last week when I tossed roasted vegetables with puy lentils, spinach and all the soft herbs I had in the fridge, but it still needed something else. So I reached for Hetty McKinnon’s cookbook Community,⁵ the source for all salad inspiration, and saw that she finishes her lentil salad with a sprinkling of candied walnuts on top. We often need something else, someone else, to help us breathe new life into our creativite endeavours.

“Like an exquisite corpse” says Gillian. “We can pass our work back and forth and see what happens.”

“It’s a resuscitation of the work,” says Jason, now animated. “It’s not so much a pivot; we need defibrillators, we need to shock it back to life.”

I hadn’t thought of exquisite corpses in so long. I remember playing the game⁶ with my cousins in our aunt Sandra’s Toronto loft surrounded by sleeping bags and little reading lamps. It started with a strip of paper each, folded into thirds. We drew a head at the top with the stash of perfectly sharpened pencils Sandra kept on hand. Then we folded the first third of the paper down to conceal what we had drawn, leaving just two lines to indicate where the neck would begin. Then we passed it on. Torsos were drawn then folded and lines were left to indicate where the legs began, and then passed one last time. Then we rolled around laughing at the wild bodies we had created: exquisite corpses alive with knobby knees and ponytails and puffed sleeves.

New life is exquisite. It’s fresh, it’s vibrant.

Jason says goodbye. I watch him as he passes the large windows, striding along the sidewalk with purpose, as if he can’t wait another minute before he folds a painting into thirds and passes it along to Gillian.

---

I’ve talked about the April creative retreat a few times these past few letters. I can’t help it. These annual few days away breathe new life into whatever I am working on, from a story to a painting to the food simmering on the stove. The magic is a combination of a new location, a shift in weather and the perspective of those around me. I always leave feeling enriched and inspired.

One evening, before we went to bed, I told the others that I wanted to write about the conversation between Gillian and Jason. The way the tone had changed when a collective hope entered the conversation. They listened, kind and smiling, but we were tired. I could feel my voice slipping through my fingers, growing thin and pale. To resuscitate the moment, I suggested playing a quick game of exquisite corpse, but instead of bodies, why not create a recipe? Start with ingredients, fold the paper down, pass it to the right, add something more, fold, then pass again? Imagine! But the game came out sounding messy, like a goulash gone wrong. We sat in silence, until Andrea suggested sticking to the original game - a quick exquisite corpse to get us in the mood. Sandra wasn’t sure. It was late. But we started anyway.

I drew Andrea’s face across from me, with her signature hair twists and glasses. Sandra drew a serious face, perhaps someone contemplating creating art against her will. Andrea drew an animal’s face - a dog? A fox? And then it rolled from there. The unfolding was exquisite. We laughed - a bandaid on the knee! Socks with heels! A tennis skirt! Andrea pulled out her paints and we finished off the images with colourful borders and shadows and stars and stripes. The next morning over coffee we laughed again. Sandra loved them so much she asked if she could stitch the corpses into her journal.

For breakfast I heated up the pouding chômeur⁷ leftover from the day before. But this time I served it with a dollop of yogurt and blueberries from the fridge. A fresh take on yesterday’s work.

1. Claire Cameron’s latest 🐻

2. Gillian Frise 🦄

3.

Toronto Ink Company

🦋

4. True Story.

5. Community 🌱

6. Exquisite Corpse, explained

7. Pouding Chômeur, a story of mine from late April, 2021