One of McCracken's works
"When I was 16 years old, talking to a friend about a song that it was orange , I realized for the first time that nobody else saw what i saw ". Who remembers this is {#result_box} Melissa S McCracken , a young painter who has become famous for capturing the images she perceives when she listens to songs.
Thus, the folkie theme ** Heart Of Life **, by John Mayer, becomes in her mind a constellation of blue and purple , which are born from a kind of white storm that was previously yellow, while the Cello Suite No. 1 , by Bach, is transcribed as a cascade of white, orange and magenta on a navy blue background.
This is how McCracken sees the 'Suite for cello nº1'
McCracken has spent her entire life living with the synesthesia, defined as "the subjective sensation, typical of a sense, determined by another sensation that affects a different sense ". However, it was in 2014, she was 22 years old, when she began to capture it in her works with the aim that her friends and her family could see the same as her.
"In my brain, music translates into a wonderful flow of color. It swirls and changes as the song progresses, and as new instruments or voices are introduced, I see new colors and textures. The images vary from song to song, and are generally very complicated ", explains the artist.
The most pleasant to paint, however, are not those with the most technical watermarks, but rather those that have been composed "putting all my heart" in them. So McCracken doesn't care about gender - "as long as be dynamic and have feelings "-, and her favorites when picking up the brush are {#resultbox} Radiohead and James Blake : "They write with very specific intentions, creating many cohesive color layers ".
Precisely because of everything that kind of music makes her feel, it is difficult for the artist to accept capturing a custom song even though she does sometimes. "It depends on the particular topic. Some don't translate very well into images , or simply, they do not interest me". For those reasons, they would not serve her objective: to create a work that increase our open-mindedness: "My hope is to transcend traditional interpretations of experience and reimagine what is familiar to us.