Jessica Rose Reviews Catherine Ocelot's Art Life
Catherine Ocelot (translation by Aleshia Jensen). Art Life. BDANG/Conundrum Press. $20.00, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781772620467
Near the end of Art Life, Montreal-based cartoonist Catherine Ocelot’s introspective and playful graphic novel about her own life as a creator, she asks herself a question many of us could ask ourselves right now: “Should I stop watching TV and do some work?” Seated on her couch, books piled on a table beside her and a steaming beverage in hand, it’s clear that even in her quietest moments, she’s questioning her productivity. In many instances in Art Life, we see that there’s little division between her personal and professional life.
First published in French in 2018 as La Vie d'artiste, and named winner of the Prix Bédélys for best comic in Quebec, Art Life explores the role of artists (and in turn, art) in our contemporary world. In a series of vignettes, Ocelot has conversations with seven of her artist friends, each a storyteller, whether through film, comics, or other media. Together, they explore doubts, disappointments, and observations — some funny, some tragic — connected to living the “Art Life.”
Breaking from tradition, Art Life is free of the boxed frames one might expect to see in a comic — handwritten text bubbles floating freely. In this imaginative book, characters aren’t human: they’re bird-like, with colourful plumes, wings for arms, and human legs. The absence of facial expressions forces readers to pay close attention to characters’ narrative and body language for clues about how each is feeling.
Art Life is in part a rumination on art, but equally it’s about communication. In each thoughtful conversation with her friends, Ocelot is a skilled listener, asking questions and collecting their experiences. Her talk with Marcel, a filmmaker, about growing up in Chicoutimi is especially poignant: “Saying you’re an artist meant you’re important enough to be talked about, looked at, read. Around there, that was pretentious. It’s going against this kind of modesty that requires you to ‘know your place’,” he says.
Much of Art Life is about place, including the public and private physical spaces Ocelot moves between. As a writer, she works from home, “so my everyday is my apartment,” she says. She considers creating a book that illustrates her daily surroundings: her bookshelves, bottles of red nail polish, and her house plants, to little fanfare from her publisher. Self-doubt and fear of failure feature prominently in Art Life, so it’s fitting that a fear of falling also reoccurs.
Art Life is likely to resonate best with artists who identify with the often-solitary and sometimes precarious “Art Life.” Yet her daily observations and the candid relationships she captures between friends will have wider appeal. If one role of an artist is elevated over others in Art Life it’s an artist’s role as an observer, and Ocelot’s keen eye for her surroundings results in an outlandish, yet melancholy, read.
Jessica Rose is a writer, editor, and reviewer who has written for publications across Canada. Her book reviews have been appeared in magazines, including Quill and Quire, Room, Ricepaper, This, and the Humber Literary Review. Jessica is a senior editor at the Hamilton Review of Books and a founding editor of The Inlet. She has close to ten years of experience in educational publishing and is a former board and committee member of gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival. She is books editor at This magazine.