Page 118 - KW LUXURY MAGAZINE

Color of a Melody
A phenomenon called synesthesia enables this artist to hear see music like few others.
By Jessica Ganga
Aburst of blue. A shot of yellow. A splash of pinks and purples. These colors,
and a combination of others, ll up
the canvases that 28-year-old artist Melissa McCracken paints. The barrage of colors come
to McCracken in her mind as she listens to her favorite music. Each note, each instrument making a song appear more beautiful than the next.
Synesthesia, which is what allows McCracken to see the colorful imagery, is a perceptual and neurological condition where a person’s senses are essentially cross-wired. In other cases, people can taste words, give numbers and letters personalities or see them as different colors, which McCracken says she sees as well. It wasn’t until McCracken was about 16 years old that she discovered she had synesthesia.
“I was choosing a ringtone for my cell phone,” says McCracken. “And I was trying to choose a song that would match my phone. I was sitting with a friend and I was listening to orange songs because I thought that they would complement my blue phone.” Everything clicked for her during her time in college where she studied psychology, along with communications.
It wasn’t until her family and friends began to understand synesthesia and have conversations about it, that McCracken decided it was time to paint what she saw.
“I would kind of lay out the colors and the texture of it, but then it eventually got to the point where I was like, ‘This is silly. I feel like I should just show you what it is and you would have a better understanding of what I’m experiencing,’” says McCracken.
At rst, McCracken didn’t know what career path she wanted to take. She always knew she wanted to be an artist, but feared it wouldn’t be a good choice or a practical one. After college, she traveled to Germany to work as an au pair for a year. It was then, with the encouragement and support of her parents, that she decided to pursue art as her career, combining three of her favorite things: art, music and psychology.
Each painting has its own way of going from song to canvas, McCracken explains. In the beginning, most of her paintings came from memory, her rst piece coming to her from a memory of her older brother practicing Jimi Hendrix’s song “Little Wing” on guitar when they
116
PHOTO OF MELISSA MCCRACKEN BY KELLY KUHN;
MUSICAL NOTES IMAGE BY MOHAMED HASSAN FROM PIXABAY