The Sight of Music

Tracey Murkett talks to artist Jane Mackay about her extraordinary gift - the ability to see sound

Bernstein: First Movement,
Three Dance Episodes from On the Town,
watercolour on paper, 23 x 30 cm

Jane Mackay qualified as a doctor in 1970. Now a full-time artist, she has exhibited extensively , and the Welcome Wing at London's Science Museum features her work to illustrate synaesthesia

Imagine listening to music, or hearing a word or noise and seeing the sound as colour or shape. Artist Jane Mackay paints the images she sees when she listens to classical music and sees letters, days of the week and names as specific colours. She has synaesthesia - a neurological condition which is thought to affect at least one in 2000 people in the U.K. David Hockney has it, Kandinsky claimed he had it and Mackay believes many people especially artists, may have it without realising that they can see things that others don't. Synaesthesia 'mixes up' the senses - some see sound as colour and images, others perceive taste as shapes. If you think about it, language is riddled with synaesthetic images - cool blue, warm sounds and sharp tastes.

Mackay trained as a doctor and worked as a GP in south London until 1999 when she gave up medicine to become a full-time artist - symbolically throwing her stethoscope into the Thames on New Year's Eve, engraved with her dates as a doctor and her starting date as an artist. Sales of her paintings had become steady enough to make ends meet and she says, "I just thought, life's too short!" Music is her other great passion - she plays oboe in a wind quintet and sings in the Bach Choir - and she has painted music for as long as she can remember.

"My sister and I used to argue about the colours of the days of the week as children, and it was years before I realised not everyone could see sound, or had colours for words," Mackay says. " I didn't put a name to it until eight years ago. I was talking to a psychiatrist I'd met about a series of paintings I'd done on Benjamin Britten's music, and he said: 'Oh, you must be synaesthetic'. I'd never even heard the word."

The images she gets from sounds are as real as "someone throwing a bucket of water over you, "she says. "The colour is part of the sound - it's like picking up a cup of coffee and thinking it's warm - the warmth isn't anywhere else - it's just part of it."

Mackay is now the first artist in residence with the Cambridge University Musical Society and sits in on rehearsals, painting what she hears. "When I'm listening to music the images come instantaneously," she says. "Imagination may creep in later, but imagination is quite a slow process, whereas the synaesthetic image is just there. It's better if it's music you are not used to. Sometimes if it's a piece of music I know well, the colours are so familiar I almost don't notice them."

The paintings vary according to what she focuses on in the music - sometimes they are abstract, other times the music she sees is figurative. She may paint a whole movement; a section of music or the picture may just show a single chord. Generally the higher the pitch of music, the lighter the colour, but particular instruments have specific colours. "Clarinets are usually in blues and bassoons are rich plummy sienna colours. But the colours of the instruments can often be overtaken by a musical phrase."

Mackay says she is probably the only synaesthetic artist to work with a music group. It is extraordinary, she says, watching the colours of the music change as she listens. "Sometimes when a note is slightly out of tune it's a muddy, opaque colour - when it hits the right note it has an amazing transparency." At Cambridge she works at the rehearsals with a small set of watercolours, making colour sketches with pencil notations and then painting scaled up versions in the studio, listening to her recording of the rehearsal and trying to be as accurate as possible. She can retain colour in her head for years, she says, but it is mixing the exact tone that takes the time. The main problem with painting music is the speed at which images come. Mackay tries to be true to the original vision, "burning down the image onto paper" and tries not to be too conscious of composition while she's working. "Sometimes I'll do something that isn't any good as a picture - I've still got images of music in my head that I know aren't worth painting for a gallery or client."

Most tantalising, though, are the fantastic texture or sculpture shapes Mackay sometimes sees. "I'd love to construct things from music. There was a wonderful Messiaen piano composition that was divided into 20 pieces - I saw it as a wonderful, transparent, glittering glass mobile - I'd love to make it - but all I've got is a watercolour sketch."

As a child she says she felt that if she was painting something in front of her, a landscape or a still life, it was somehow cheating. "If you are really painting, it has to come from up here," she says, tapping her head. "It's more interesting to paint the essence of something. I can count on one hand the times I've faithfully reproduced something." Not surprisingly many of her images have been used as CD covers and recently Mackay was commissioned to illustrate a book by Mauritian poet, Danielle R Nairac. The richly visual, biblical poems inspired images very quickly. "I would be reading, and then suddenly have the whole scene in front of me and have to try and get it down on paper as quickly as possible." Mackay says if she has a commission she always paints several versions and lets the client choose, rather than feeling restricted by a client as she's working.

Many of her paintings are bought by musicians, and her visual response to music can be more accurate than relying on her ears. " I was listening to music on the radio and a choral piece that I knew extremely well came on and I assumed it was the famous recording by the King's College Choir. But the top C instead of being a smooth creamy arc, which it normally is, had a serrated bottom edge with a pinkish colour. Although it was almost the same I knew it was a different recording - not because it sounded different - but because it looked different." Mackay says her residency at Cambridge University Musical Society is the perfect environment for her. She attends almost every rehearsal and has even discovered an oboist in the orchestra who can see colours from sounds and had no idea that most people do not. Back in her converted attic studio, overlooking the back gardens of south London, Jane Mackay reflects on her good fortune to be working with musicians. " It's absolutely wonderful to be there, sitting in rehearsals, listening to fabulous music and doing what I love doing - painting what I hear."