The idea behind this series was to use a condition I have called Synesthesia to determine the palette and design for each piece. Synesthesia is a unique neurological condition in which two or more sensory pathways within the brain overlap. This causes one pathway to lead to involuntary experiences in another pathway. Two of the most common forms of this condition are Grapheme-Color Synesthesia which is the association of colors with numbers and/or letters and Chromesthesia which causes individuals to associate specific colors with sounds. I have both of these forms of synesthesia, but used only Chromesthesia for this series.

I chose a West-African jazz album called Tchokola featuring the famous electric violin player, Jean Luc Ponty, that my parents often played throughout my childhood. It is an album that brought a certain emotion and feeling that I haven't felt with any other music, and the colors I saw when I heard it were so vibrant and animated that I had to turn those visions into paintings. Based on the colors and patterns I saw, I felt the best way to exemplify my visions was to use oils, to paint abstractly and to use a palette knife.

I created nine paintings in total, each named after the song that inspired it. Two of them (Mam'Mai and Mouna Bowa) were painted directly from a song on the album. Once these paintings were complete, I photographed them, and chose specific close-up sections to create the remaining seven paintings from. Those are the "Extracts".

Mam'Mai is the second painting I created directly from the song, "Mam"Mai", on Tchokola.


Dimensions - 6 ft. X 39.75"

*Painting is signed on the back

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