“What do I know about art? I’m not an artist!” I mutter at my computer and look around for a sympathetic audience. The cat is snoring in the other room. “I don’t even have enough credentials to have an opinion about art!” I look at my lunch plate and lament my fate to a goat-cheese lasagna. The lasagna is non-responsive. I stab another bite with my fork and turn to typing.

Art pierces me. It feeds me. It nourishes me in a way I cannot be fed otherwise.

Fortunate enough to have a job that whirls me regularly around the world, any trip that finds me gifted with two extra hours to rub together means I can be found in that city’s museum, rubbing shoulders with art.

My sojourn started decades ago, with one painting. Rossetti’s Proserpine. It got me. It got under my skin. I don’t know if it was the angle or the color or the light or the texture or the physical manifestation of a mythological tale I’d studied since grade school. I saw it on a postcard. And then I found it in a book. And then I began a pilgrimage.

I easily admit to being a docent’s nightmare. I don’t touch the art, or breath too hard on it, or wave my arms around or snap unauthorized photographs in special exhibits. But I weep. Unbidden, unplanned, unrestrained. Sotto voce and seemingly ceaselessly, I weep.

I am unable to predict what might spur an outburst of reverent emotion. Originally it was when I’d encounter up close and personal a massive masterwork I’d previously seen only postage-stamp size, reproduced in the pages of an art history book.

Mister Louis didn’t help matters any. My college art history professor, he lavished us with plush and vibrant slideshows of the paintings that broke his heart and made him whole, his face reflecting shamelessly the love he held for a brushstroke or the nuance of a pose. Annually, he demanded we all crowd into his tiny home and pour through his art books while he poured us tea. It was elegant and inspiring and unforgettable. I took both sessions of his class. Instead of accounting. I had to get permission from the Dean of my college. I was persuasive. Mister Louis had set my palate, and my taste for art became an epic appetite.

In the last year I’ve visited the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (where I knelt and wept near Rossetti’s Loving Cup), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (where I was astonished to find out I adore Modigliani and works more modern than my previous proclivities might belie), and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City where I realized that art is a multi-dimensional representation of a community and a culture.

And that may be what it is for me. The snapshot into a time or place or community or culture I could see no other way than through the eyes of an artist whose own lens was pinpointed on a moment I cannot experience for myself but can still see and feel and taste. Goya’s sketches revealing religious turbulence during Inquisition Spain. Gauguin in Tahiti, venting his spleen against “civilized Europe” and pouring his heart out through his paint. Toulouse-Lautrec allowing us behind the sultry and seamy curtain of the Moulin Rouge. Art is an invitation to sit at the table and commune with ideas and insight I would otherwise not have opportunity to ingest.

I have, by the way, wept over the Proserpine. Primarily because I’ve never seen it. The one time I was at the Tate Britain it was down in a vault for cleaning or conservation or simply to confound me. Like Cassandra at the gate, I pleaded to an army of docents, who passed me up the ladder to a sympathetic curator, who did her best to get the Proserpine rotated into the collection. Which it was. On the day I boarded a plane back to the United States.

And so, appetite whetted, my pilgrimage continues.

© 2010 Deena Ebbert