Synaesthesia, a harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously.
Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world's first truly abstract paintings. Wassily Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia. Believing that he heard hissing sounds when he mixxed certain colors, he either came to believe colors triggered noise or he was attempting to evoke certain sounds with certain colors of paint. "The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men."
Composition VII, 1913 by Kandinsky
Despite the lack of medical proof for Kandinsky's synaesthesia, the correlation between sound and colour was a lifelong preoccupation for the artist. He recalled hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments. Sean Rainbird, curator of Tate's forthcoming Kandinsky exhibition, says, "My feeling is that he was quite a natural at it. To have painted the largest work he ever made, Composition VII, in just three days, shows that this language was quite internalised."
Unfortunately, I do not have synaesthesia. I bought a 2008 calendar for my bathroom wall and each month displayed a different Kandinski composition I loved the brilliant use of color and I tried hard to decypher the paimtings, but I never heard a sound. I do not know the blue of the cello or what red sounds like. I have no seventh sense. I wish I could experience what Kandinski did when he painted.
Kandinaski was born on December 4th, the day my father was born and died on December 13, 1944, the year I was born.
