Synesthesia drawings explained
Colors of each letter of the alphabet as I “see” them placed into a color wheel format of my own design with tracing paper overlay.
Since last year’s post, Synelindesthesia, where I described organizing the colors of each alphabet letter as I perceive them into a color wheel, I have been making watercolor drawings by plotting written passages using a tracing paper template from that wheel.
After making the color wheel, I tried plotting ”sovereign” onto a blank piece of paper using the tracing paper template and drawing colored rays from each letter of the word in order, it looked like this:
Minus the letters and shaded in a bit more carefully, it became this:
I decided to try a whole poem and plotted out “Vermeer” by Wislawa Szymborska, with the number of times each letter appeared written as a superscript (vowels down at the left):
Over the winter I made several dozen of these, eventually discarding any notation on the page and just working with the overlapping color fields. I experimented with background color, and what written material to use, often challenging myself to make one in a day using an observation from the weather or an astrological event. Fortunately, I discovered the Derwent Inktense pencils which are permanent (unlike regular watercolor pencils) and allow for overlapping layers of pigment, indispensable for this process.
“Kunzite”. Watercolor ink pencil, tea. 2020.
The last three I just completed, the Bridal Veil series, illustrate in three parts a poem I wrote in 1996:
When I finished the last one, I realized it reminded me a lot of Hilma Klint’s Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece. Funny how the brain works.
Here’s the complete collection of full-sized Synesthesia drawings.