Painting

When he asked me if I could smell colors, I answered with a bored, eyelids-half-closed, "Yeah." Smelling colors can seem somewhat obvious -- rose can smell anywhere from blushing pink to blood red. Grassy notes smell bright green. Cinnamon, a reddish-brown. But I'd been putting these observations on the back burner ever since a perfumer got upset with my efforts to communicate in color. The top notes of her fragrance were very green and yellow, like apple juice made from Granny Smiths, and what the fragrance needed was a softer, more powdery effect, like laundy detergent in cornflower blue. I asked for what I needed using these color descriptions, but she didn't really understand what I meant. That was my last attempt to communicate using color. So when he asked me to paint the fragrances I smelled, I was a bit skeptical and frustrated over the "point of all this."

I clicked opened the box of watercolors and realized that it'd been so long since I'd done anything this overtly 'artistic' that I had to remind myself how to use the little cup of water. On the table in front of me were three unlabeled fine fragrances. Each one was completely different from the next. I had an unlimited amount of time to paint what I smelled. I dipped a blotter, inhaled deeply, and picked up the little paintbrush.

I don't know how long I painted, but when I finished, I felt amazingly calm and clear. I felt completely open and relaxed, like someone had massaged my brain. Painting perfumes seemed to give me all the benefits of meditation without the effort. It had been an active process that felt strangely...passive. It was like I'd skipped the whole process of interpretation, and the colors on the page simply WERE the perfumes. Each one looked completely different, but it all seemed so obvious and clear.

Later, he showed me watercolors done by perfumers using the same fragrances. In one I had missed a couple dashes of red, but otherwise, you could match my paintings to theirs. It was like discovering that I could speak a language I didn't even know existed.

I need to buy some paint supplies.