Sharing Synesthesia Through Art
This unique bond between synesthetes is one of the reasons Steen helped found the American Synesthesia Association in 1995. “After forty-two years of searching,” she says, “there weren’t any answers.” Other than her father, who refused to speak about his synesthesia for years, Steen had been introduced, through a researcher, to one other synesthete in New York City, where she was now living. Talking one evening they decided there had to be others. Of course, there were, and the ASA now has over 300 members and has hosted seven national conferences.
The estrangement Steen felt growing up, knowing that her perceptions were different from others’—the same feeling that motivated her to found the ASA—also almost prevented her from becoming a painter. In her early artistic career, Steen opted for sculpture instead. She was attracted to the relatively limited color palette of the metals and woods she worked with. “I didn’t want to work with the colors,” she says, that she saw every day. But years later, after a fortunate accident with her etchings printer and the uncanny discovery that she had unconsciously been working in shapes and forms commonly perceived by synesthetes, she knew she had to paint what she experienced.
As well as grapheme-color synesthesia, Steen has sound-color synesthesia and touch-color synesthesia. Her paintings are visual representations of the brilliant, moving colors and shapes she experiences while listening to music by Coldplay and Santana or while receiving acupuncture treatment. They are a vivid swoop of shimmering gold on a glossy, midnight-black background, splotches of yellow-green, and swirls of indigo. The one color Steen rarely sees, however, is purple. “I feel short-changed,” she jokes. “I wonder who to talk to about that.”
Steen is most definitely not alone as a synesthete-artist. It’s believed as many as one in eight synesthetes go into a creative profession, including some very well known historical and contemporary artists, musicians, and novelists: Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent Van Gogh, Vladimir Nabokov, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, and John Mayer.
Perception is a funny thing in its inalienable subjectivity, and, perhaps, the sharing of perception is the pursuit of all artists. For non-synesthetes, the art of those “gifted,” as Steen says, with joined senses, may be as close as we’ll ever come to hearing the symphony of the aurora borealis or seeing the kaleidoscope of a hug. Thank goodness, then, for art.
