Artist’s Statement
My long, colorful pastel paintings portray musical compositions. Due to a natural blending of my sense of sight and sound, often called synesthesia, I have the ability to hear music in color. I use my personal experience of consistent and automatic natural associations of musical harmonies and color to create my paintings.
Although I experienced synesthesia early in my life, I now have formal training in music theory and performance, and my paintings reflect my unique experience of color and harmony by tracking the progress of a composition as it is performed. I use the patterns created by the colors in my paintings to convey the meaning and the beauty of the music they depict, and I think of them like sentences and words conveying the meaning of a speaker.
I appreciate the use of the abstract qualities of music and color as the most direct way to express thoughts and emotions, but I have found that considering the way colors are displayed in nature during specific seasons or times of day helps me create a painting that has not only a meaningful pattern, but also, like a performance, has a sense of time and place. The challenge for me as an artist is to provide the color patterns produced by my private synesthetic experience with a setting that transforms them and brings them to life.