Museum Art Gallery 1 and Synesthesia

Last week, my grandfather's art work went up in the Cascadia Art Museum in Seattle. I was flooded with photos and videos of the exhibit and quickly realized something incredible.

Your mind is about to be blown.

Ready?

I think my grandfather had synesthesia.

As I was looking at the images of his painting - they felt very familiar. Something about the movement of the colors in his pieces, the way the that colors interact with one another - it was like he had painted what I see in my mind. Of course, its not exactly what I see in my mind but the way that the colors are layered feel identical to what I see when I hear music.

This piece on the right looks like a Foster the People song, Houdini. The colors are similar to different parts in the song - when I saw this image my mind automatically responded by recalling this song.

What's also interesting is that he got it "right". In the past, I've tried drawing or painting what I see when I listen to music, but it never looked right to me. I think its because I was drawing it how I would draw a something if I had a tangible image to reference to - rather than looking at it like one big concept. I asked my dad how my grandfather would paint, because my grandfather passed away years ago, and my dad said that he would lay a large canvas board on the ground and go around with a paint brush and add one color at a time. I think this summer I might try to paint what I hear and what I see. Because the difficult thing about my synesthesia is different parts of songs look differently because of the instruments used might changed or it might be softer or louder. So I would always be frustrated. Maybe I should stop looking at sections of the song and rather look at it as a whole.

Apart from the synesthesia, there was something else that was interesting. One of my grandfather's art pieces looked very similar to some of mine. This image on the right is one that my grandfather did. In February of this year, there were three weeks when I did maybe five sketch book drawings that looked relatively similar to my grandfather's piece here. At the time, I wasn't actively recalling my grandfather's art work - it was just a stress reliever to draw abstract lines in the form of a circle. I thought that was interesting because I know I have seen this piece of his before but when I was sketching in my notebook, it was completely subconscious.


Overall though, I think seeing these photos at least was incredible for me because, especially for the synesthesia, it finally felt tangible or looked right to me.


///FAST FORWARD TO THIS SUMMER TO WHERE I ACTUALLY WENT TO THE EXHIBIT///

WOW IT WAS SO INCREDIBLE. I loved going it was amazing. Ok heres the thing though. When you look at my grandfather's pieces from a far, it looks like 'oh yeah totally he has synesthesia' but when I looked at them closely - it was actually quite different. His pieces were so much more detailed than I had ever appreciated before. His use of color was so much more precise than any memory or photo had ever conveyed. His concepts and themes were so much more personal than I had ever expected. I don't know it really was just so incredible.