The idea that my view of the world, it's shapes, sounds, geometries, and colors, might not be shared by others has always fascinated me.
To me, the big Magnolia tree in my yard has a rough, splotched brown trunk framed by long, curved branches and their glossy green leaves.
To me, the sound of violins is soothing and evokes soft, gentle emotions of longing and beauty.
To me, wood and brick evoke feelings of warmth and contentment.
To me, letters and numbers are whatever color someone writes or types them out to be.
To my friend, Mel, these same letters and numbers have their own unique color associations. M-E-L isn't just Mel, it's magenta-”really really light sea foam”-red/orange. While letters have a wide assortment of colors, numbers are more saturated, vibrantly different. Well, all except the off-white 1 and 8. [[Why?!, Just why?!]] These involuntary associations are a result of a rare condition known as synesthesia in which an individual’s unrelated senses are activated with another and can take many different forms depending on which senses are mixed and to what extent
Out of curiosity one day over lunch we both mused what would come out of a color-by-letters/numbers experiment? Would there be enough coherency between the colors to make art? What would that art look like? Would any interesting associations spill out onto the canvas? Taking a landscape near and dear to her heart, Greenland, we spent a few afternoons exploring these questions. I’d sketch something out and assign the various shapes with letters or numbers and she’d mix the colors that belonged to each. We did three variations of this…
1.] This was the most thought-out piece. The main components of the landscape used letters that identified what they were. The rocks in the foreground were colored with B [[boulder]], P [[pebbles]], and R [[the cracks between the rocks]], the water, W and the ice I, C, and E. Once we had finished this portion of the painting, we were astonished at how well all of those letters recreated the scene. The ice looked like ICE (?!)…the rocks, though a bit saturated, could pass for rocks (?!)…and the water looked like a calm, glassy body of water(?!). Since I didn’t want to repeat the C that had already been used in the ice, I labeled the sky with O and N for open sky and not open sky. The results were a bit less realistic than the rest of the piece, but an interesting contrast to the more explicit labeling, nonetheless.
2.] In contrast to the first one that had used only letters, this next one used only numbers. The technicolor sky was a mix of 1, 2, and 3 while the mountain was shaded with 8 and 9.
3.] This final one was randomly composed out of an assortment of letters. The X and Y ice is floating on a sea of G beneath a J and H sky.
Once these colors were mixed and blended into the landscapes they represented, we realized we hadn’t been as thorough in our documentation as we had set out to be. We figured it’d be easy to guess after the fact what color had been what letter. However, Mel found it hard to recall exactly what letter some things had been labeled as. She intuitively wanted to associate the numbers/letters with colors, not colors with their respective numbers/letters. Through this process, we also realized how similar some of the colors were to one another. The blue sky between the peach clouds in the third piece became hard to distinguish between the more starkly contrasting blue of the water below. Were the blues different? Did they appear different to Mel because of the colors that surrounded them? Were they different, but only subtly? If they were different, were they A, G, or J? Why were those letters all so similar in Mel’s mind?
I’m curious if any of you readers out there (whoever you are) have some form of synesthesia yourselves. I’m fascinated by the idea of doing a similar artistic collaboration with another person’s associations to see how differently they manifest between individuals.
If you or anyone you know would like to take this collaboration further reach out to me at definechase.art@gmail.com
Let’s explore this deeper!