The Color of Sound

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The Color of Sound

When I was seven, I told my mother that Tuesdays were yellow. She laughed, not unkindly, and said something about imagination. But I wasn't imagining. Tuesdays were yellow — a warm, buttery yellow, like the inside of a sunflower.

Crossing Wires

Synesthesia is the neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sense triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in another. For me, it manifests primarily as sound-to-color associations. A minor chord is deep blue. A snare drum is a flash of white. My own name is a soft green.

It's not a superpower. It's not even particularly useful. But it has shaped the way I make art in ways I'm only beginning to understand.

Painting What I Hear

My painting practice began as an attempt to translate what I hear into what I see. The first canvases were literal — almost naive — transcriptions of songs into color fields. Over time, the process became more abstract, more intuitive. I stopped trying to be accurate and started trying to be honest.

The result is work that doesn't illustrate music so much as remember it. Each painting is a residue of listening.

The Space Between

What interests me most is not the crossing of senses, but the space between them. That liminal zone where a sound is almost a color, where a texture is almost a taste. This is where I think the most interesting art lives — not in clarity, but in the blur.


Originally published in The Margins Review, Spring 2024.