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"Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically."
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)
Synesthesia derives from the Greek syn, meaning “union” plus aisthaesis, meaning “sensation,” and thus means "joined sensation," such as when something that is ordinarily "seen" is tasted as well. But this dry definition hardly does justice to the psychological, creative - even mystical - experience of synesthesia. There are well-documented examples of almost all possible joinings of the senses - smelling sounds, hearing colors, feeling shapes, etc. Well known synesthetes include Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Nobokov, David Hockney, Richard Feynman, and Alexander Scriabin. Contemporary "synesthetic" artists include Carol Steen and Marcia Smilack.

In my case, up until about the age of 10, I vividly remember perceiving numbers (and, less frequently, letters) as colors; eve...

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Andy Ilachinski
Andy Ilachinski
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A Ph.D. physicist specializing in modeling complex adaptive systems (by day), Andy spends most of his free time with a camera. A founding member of Lorton Arts Foundation's Workhouse Photographic Society in 2009 (near Occoquan, VA), his photographs have won numerous awards, have been exhibited in many juried solo and group shows, hang in galleries, businesses, and private homes, and have appeared in numerous publications. Featured in Lenswork four times, spotlighted in Black & White twice, Andy also won the international book contest sponsored by the UK Black + White Photography magazine in 2007. His blog (tao-of-digital-photography.blogspot.com, started in 2004) has been named one of the top 100 photography blogs by Photography Colleges (www.photography-colleges.org). Andy has just published a portfolio collection (containing images 2005-2015) along with ten of the most popular essays that have appeared on his blog during the last decade. Link: http://www.blurb.com/b/6472397-suddenstillness
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