"What the FUCK is Synesthesia?"

Sometime around 2015, I found out I had synesthesia by accident.

I was at my studio doing a photo shoot with a photographer friend who moonlighted in philosophy, psychology and dark arts. Cool guy. No idea what happened to him. We were waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, killing time, and I started playing him demos and unfinished beats.

This was back when I could spend an unreasonable amount of time explaining exactly who should be on a record that didn’t yet have an artist, a release date or any real reason to exist.

I was walking him through one of the instrumentals.

“This feels like this kind of artist. This part needs to open up here. The bass needs to feel heavier. This synth needs to sit above everything.”

He was watching me work and noticed that I had color-coded all the synths in my programming.

Then he asked me a question nobody had ever asked me before.

“What shape is that synth?”

I looked at him.

Then I answered.

Not metaphorically. Not, Oh, it feels round.

I gave him a fucking architectural rendering.

I started moving my hands through the air, showing him where the sound was sitting, how wide it was, which direction it was moving, what color it was and what shape the bass made underneath it. I could practically pull the different pieces of the song out of the air and show them to him.

He just stared at me.

“You have synesthesia.”

“What the fuck is synasthesia?”

“You associate sounds with colors and shapes.”

“Okay. Doesn’t everyone?”

“No.”

Apparently not.

Apparently, most people don’t hear a synthesizer and immediately see a glowing geometric object floating three feet above an imaginary bass line.

Who knew?

Synesthesia is relatively uncommon. Estimates vary depending on how it’s defined and tested, but the number often cited is roughly four percent of the population.

For me, though, there had never been anything unusual about it. It was simply how music worked.

I never learned to sight-read music. I played by ear. I produced by instinct. I could pull apart sounds and frequencies in my head and attach objects, movement, texture, color and, occasionally, even smell to them.

Music was also welded to memory for me in an almost absurd amount of detail. A song didn’t just remind me of a period in my life. It could put me back in the room: the temperature, the lighting, where I was standing, what the furniture looked like, who was there and what I was feeling.

I assumed everybody’s brain worked that way.

A few years later, I gave my first artist talk at my first solo exhibition in Detroit.

There were probably seventy-five or eighty people there—roughly seventy-four or seventy-nine more people than I wanted staring at me while I talked about myself for an hour.

The funny thing is, I love talking about myself. Call it narcissistic, but I’m at least self-aware about it. From what I understand, recognizing those tendencies—and trying to change them—probably disqualifies me from the full narcissist title anyway. And I most certainly have tried to change. Believe me, I’ve questioned and researched narcissism more than the average bear, mostly because it’s familiar territory. Some of the people closest to me gave me plenty to study.

So yes, narcissistic tendencies? Sure. I’m probably my own favorite subject and my most hated subject at the same time. I can talk about my work, my process and my life for hours. But the second I realize everyone in the room is actually listening, I want to crawl out of my own skin.

I was nervous as fuck.

They had a chair set up for me, but sitting calmly while discussing myself is essentially my version of waterboarding, so I asked if I could stand and lean against the piano instead.

I pace when I think. I pace when I talk on the phone. I pace when I’m working something out. If my brain is going somewhere, apparently the rest of my body feels obligated to follow.

One of the first questions was:

“How do you paint? What drives your process?”

That answer was easy.

Music.

Loud as fuck.

Give me a roughly ten-foot circle, turn the music up until rational thought becomes difficult and leave me alone.

The beginning of a painting is usually physical before it’s intellectual. I attack the base layer. I move with the beat. Paint gets thrown, dragged, scraped and splattered. Sometimes I’m practically dancing around the canvas like an asshole.

At that point, nothing is precious.

Nothing means anything yet.

I’m just trying to find the frequency of the painting.

Then something starts to appear.

A shape. A phrase. A face. A memory. Something funny. Something horrible. Usually some combination of all five.

Eventually, the painting tells me what it wants to become.

I explained that when I paint, I’m not just listening to the music. I’m seeing it.

The notes become colors.

The sounds become shapes.

A moody song pulls me toward deep purples, blacks and grays.

Trance—which is still probably my favorite music to paint to—becomes neon green, electric pink, detailed linework and splatter. Everything moves. Everything glows.

Hip-hop tends to get bigger. Harder geometry. Squares. Blocks. Urban shapes. Weight.

Soundtracks can take things somewhere much darker.

Put on John Carpenter and suddenly we’re having a very different afternoon.

The Thing. Halloween III.

Or Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score: silver, chrome, black and violent streaks of neon. Tech noir smeared across a canvas.

I will paint some deeply fucked-up shit to an analog synthesizer.

I was a synth player, so I know exactly what makes those sounds appeal to me: the warmth, the instability, the way a note can feel mechanical and alive at the same time.

A good analog synth doesn’t just make a sound.

It breathes.

That’s the point.

The music isn’t background noise.

The music is part of the material.

The entire room has to become the painting before the painting becomes anything worth looking at: the volume, the movement, the colors, the mess, whatever memory gets accidentally kicked loose along the way.

The process matters as much to me as the finished object.

After I explained all of this, the guy asking the question looked at me and said:

“You have synesthesia.”

“I know.”

The entire room laughed.

Finally, a medical-adjacent term I could confidently identify without WebMD convincing me I had six months to live.

So I told them about the photo shoot and how I discovered there was a name for something I had been doing since I was a kid.

Then he pointed out something I hadn’t really considered.

It seemed to work both ways.

Sound becomes color and shape.

But color and shape also become sound.

I can look at something and almost hear what it should feel like.

Which, again, I had assumed everybody was doing.

Apparently, my lifelong strategy has been discovering that things I thought were completely normal are, in fact, not.

That realization fits neatly into the rest of my life.

I’ve spent years figuring out how to turn the things that made my life harder into things I could actually use.

ADHD became the ability to work under pressure with almost psychotic productivity. I can disappear into a studio and come out with six large paintings in a week, dehydrated, covered in paint and unsure what day it is.

Trauma became material.

Chaos became stories.

Addiction eventually became recovery.

And recovery became art.

When I got sober, music stopped feeling safe for a while. It carried too much history: too many people, places, nights and versions of myself I wasn’t interested in resurrecting.

So I found another language.

I painted.

All the shit I couldn’t explain at once—the addiction, the destruction, the shame, the absurdity, the grief, the people I hurt, the people who hurt me, the things I survived and the things I absolutely did to myself—could suddenly exist on a canvas without requiring me to explain every fucking detail.

And somehow, I could even make it funny.

That might be the most important part.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life staring backward in horror.

I’d rather look back, learn something, make something beautiful out of it and occasionally laugh at what an unbelievable asshole I used to be. Still can be, but I most certainly try my hardest not to be.

I’ve never been particularly good at eliminating my flaws.

I’ve gotten much better at putting them to work.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing my entire life: taking the noise and turning it into music, taking the music and turning it into color, taking the damage and turning it into paintings.

And taking the person I spent years trying to destroy and finally giving him something useful to do.