A Scent of Jasmine in the Evening Air

I have a problem. A problem with art.

It's not that I don't like it, or do not understand it, because I do. It's what happens to me when I view it.

My doctor tells me I'm easily over stimulated. But I ask you, have you ever heard of someone experiencing catatonia from over stimulation?

Fainting, maybe. Getting the vapors as my dear ole granny used to say, sure. But fall on the floor, out cold for an hour, call an ambulance due to an acute overdose of art?

Yep. That's me.

Like I said. I have a problem.

The first time it happened, I was a junior at Augsburg College when our art history class visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art Museum for a class trip.

To pay for tuition, I worked nights at a bakery and was in a perpetual state of exhaustion during classes, so that may have had something to do with what happened next.

The professor was discussing a work by the photorealist Chuck Close when a few of us snuck over to check out an enormous canvas by Maxfield Parrish called The Dinky Bird.

We were there to study post-modern art, not 20th century illustrators. But I was transported. One moment I'm dragging my feet in a stupor of extreme fatigue and in the next I am thunderstruck, transported, a child in a magical realm, swinging naked beneath the shadow of a fairy castle in the clouds.

Imagine my surprise at awakening in an emergency room being treated for a concussion!

Eventually I learned my lesson and stopped visiting art gallery's and museums. My wife suggested the solution after I collapsed in the National Gallery in London when we visited its glorious Impressionist collection.

But I had stood a bare ten paces from paintings by Van Gogh, in person, for the first time in my life! Can you imagine? I fairly shivered with excitement until naturally I collapsed yet again. But in a state of catatonia, I was once again carried away to another world. I sat in Van Gogh's chair with his pipe and tobacco in hand and I was him! I saw the world around me as he must have seen it. The simplest objects filling me with unutterable awe. I literally wept for joy.

When I finally awoke, my wife told me that I wasn't safe visiting art museums. We bought an Illustrated book with all of the art at the National Gallery for me to enjoy at home. Where its safe. In my Lazy-Boy. I've never collapsed with a book. Or looking at art online. Or gazing at our little artsy refrigerator magnets. Now our personal library is filled with a veritable catalogue of the world's greatest art works.

Decades have now passed since my last catatonia episode. I sometimes wonder if I might safely visit a museum now and again. But I'm far too old to take another fall on my noggin.

But when Ray posted his challenge with the monoprint Night Jasmine 2, 2021, by Eileen Cooper RA, quite naturally I was intrigued.

The print immediately moved me. But seeing it on my phone is not the same as using a 60-inch television as a computer monitor. I wanted to see it large enough that it would come as close to seeing it in person as I dared.

At first nothing much happened. I noted the artist's visual strategy of dividing the image in a dark background in its upper half and warm light colors in its lower. The dark cat echoes the darkness where the woman sleeps, and her flesh recalls the color and tones where the cat rests.

Only the bird is in motion, either just landed or poised to take off. Everything else seems static, at least at first. But then I noticed what I had missed looking at the image on my phone. There is movement in the background behind the figures, swirling around them, the screen fairly shimmering with motion. In a moment my flesh was stiff with catatonia, and I had impossibly joined the cat, the woman and the bird.

It was then that I experienced something that I could not have while conscious. The scent of Jasmine hung in the Evening Air. But it was not a perfume teasing the woman's bare skin or a sprig of flowers carried in the beak of the bird. It was carried by a breeze that swirled round and about us in the twilight darkness.

The wind is what holds the disparate images together and makes them whole. It is what drew me into the image with the cat that stares intensely at the viewer at rest and yet poised to leap away from danger. It is the fragility of the flitting bird who watches us rather than the cat and in the peaceful rest of a woman unafraid to dream of flowers carried on the breeze, unadorned and unprotected.

At some point, my wife turned the television and my lap top off. She tried to wake me, but I slept the rest of the night in the picture with the uneasy bird, the alert cat and the dreaming woman.

I did not awake until morning. But once I did, I smiled, the scent of jasmine still lingering in the morning air.