We eat and We art
The kitchen table has always been the main hub in my life.
When I would come home from school as a child, tired and hungry after a long day, I was always welcomed by the smell of onions and garlic cooking away. My grandmother would be sitting on the couch reading while listening to the quiet hum of a pot simmering in the kitchen next door. I would ask her, “what did you make to eat today?” and everyday she would reply faithfully with the same answer. It was stew one day, goulash the next, soup on another. She made all the possible renditions of seasonal vegetables and meat boiled for hours on end, seasoned with reminders of traditions from the place she knew of as home, and now, intermingled with the place in which she had, many thousands of miles away, made home.
It wasn’t long however, with the influence of the local Canadian ways, I began to roll my eyes when she would answer her habitual response. In time I would come to protest, “soup again!”, wishing that she would make the much more enticing ‘fast food’ options that I saw served up at my friends’ houses. She, unfazed by my response, would just nod and smile, for she could not imagine a life without the comfort of a warm bowl of soup to fill the belly and warm the spirit when coming home after a long day.
This was the way she lived her life.
There are a lot of things which made up the tapestry of my life so much so that I failed to notice and appreciate their textures and flavours until I could see them from more of a distance, which often happened at times much later in my life. Coming home to warm soup and lovingly prepared meals by my grandmother would, without me knowing it, govern the way in which I would feed others throughout my life.
It was only when I began to study art therapy that I realized how the making of art as a daily practice served the same function as my grandmother’s soups and stews, that art and food nourished the soul and the body in the same way. It is no coincidence that human animals are the only ones that cook and also create art, symbolic representations of the world in which they live.
In other words:
Cooking and art making are important habits.
Let’s imagine what it could be like if art materials were laid alongside meals on the kitchen table, if paper was the table cloth and pencils or markers, our utensils?
How would we taste our world?
What would be nourishment?
What would we cook up when we gave line and colour permission to be stirred up?
What could it be like if art was just like food, that daily we came to the art table to create, and that this was as vital to our sustenance, as the food we ingested?
What would we serve up and offer others?
What would it be like if children came home after school and were greeted with the smells of soup cooking away AND vibrant coloured paints ready and eager to be played with?
Food and art helps us know where and who we are.
Especially in those increasingly smaller pockets of the world where big business does not completely govern food production and distribution, we come to know where we are and the season, by the food that we eat and the manner in which it is prepared, and by whom, in THAT place.
Could it be that we also come to know who we are by the way in which we set the table to make art, from the materials we choose to work with, to the manner in which we choose to make our mark upon a surface?
Questions for you to contemplate throughout your day:
What would it look like if making art was your habit?
What would change in your life if art making was your sustenance and nourishment?
Notice your habits around your creative practice… is it something that is set apart from your day to day?
What are your eating habits? What are your creative habits?
What would happen if art was an integral part of your day? Was the backdrop? What if art foregrounded you into being?
How do you feed others with food, with art?
How do you eat?
Could it be that an art practice is the continuous pot simmering for hours away on the stove?
What if in amongst the chaos of the outer world, this was the one constant that you returned to?
What if the familiarity of your hands working with materials, your movements on and with a surface, emerging colours and forms, was the way in which you fed yourself and others?
