biography

synaesthesia Synaesthesia takes many forms. The most common is colour-sound synaesthesia. Most people, when they listen to a piece of music, only hear sounds. But people with colour-sound synaesthesia also see colours, each note having a specific hue. The reverse is also possible – that looking at coloured objects causes a person to hear notes. In other forms of synaesthesia, looking at a painting may overwhelm the tastebuds. There are those for whom reading lines in a poem may feel unpleasantly rough on the fingertips. These forms of synaesthesia occur when the stimulation of one sense triggers a response in another in addition to the expected one. They are genuine, involuntary, reactions. They are not imagined. They are characteristic of someone’s nervous system and are usually noticable from childhood. Synaesthesia can sometimes involve cognition rather than sense perception. In something called sequence- space synaesthesia, ordered sequences such as the minutes of the hour or the months of the year are seen forming visually patterns in the air. In the variety known as colour-space synaesthesia, an object’s position in the environment can influence its colour. Colquhoun experienced several varieties of synaesthesia and wrote about them in a series of vignettes of childhood memories known collectively as ‘Until 12.’ (1) Here are some examples Trajectory or stroke had colour – high up: pale and bright; low down, dark and dense. In this short extract she is writing about throwing coloured woollen balls into the air and watching their colour change as they rise and fall. This is colour-space synaesthesia in action. For me there were other colours than those of dye and texture, for which only an approximation can be made. Here she is highlighting another common feature of synaesthesia, that the colours she sees are too subtle to be accurately described in words. As a comparison, Wassily Kandinsky, a well-known synaesthete, said about his own synaesthesia that he could see colours “which I cannot put into words and which I can only poorly depict with my palette.” In the next two passages Colquhoun is talking about sequence-space synaesthesia: The year hung in a bellying garland, each month with its own tinge and density, beginning with New Year and ending with next Christmas a little higher at the far end. The week was similar, its days culminating with a Sunday glow. …. For her, months and days form patterns. The numbers up to the darkness of a hundred mounted a long stair — the opposite of the alphabet, a descending scale And here she is saying that in the numerical sequence 1 – 100, the numbers went upwards, but the letters of the alphabet went downwards. Additionally, just like the months, letters and numbers also had their own colours. There are some sketches in the Tate archive at TGA 929/3/18 that depict perfectly these coloured alphanumeric sequences as she saw them. The obvious question is the extent to which these unusual ways of relating to the physical and conceptual worlds are identifiable in her art. In 1976 Colquhoun wrote that, in recent years “I have come to see-hear the Psycho-morphological implications in music”; this too is a natural development for me.” The phrase “see-hear” is a clear and obvious reference to synaesthesia. By using the expression ‘psycho-morphological’ Colquhoun was referring to the paintings of, primarily Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford Esteban Frances: artists whose work she had been exposed to at Chemillieu as far back as 1939 when she had joined in their discussions of how to develop new ways of giving pictorial expression to the world of unseen forces and hidden processes. One aim of these artists was to capture on canvas or paper the full essence of an object’s existence as it unfolds through time. Years later, it may have been the possibility of capturing time that drew her to music, an art form that only comes into being as time unfolds. There are four paintings that seem to fit this description: Delius’ Irmelin, (1972); L'Ascension (Messiaen), (1974); Stockhausen’s Poles (1976) and Dark Fire (1980, inspired by Zsolt Durko’s Fire Music. But are any of these paintings a direct expression of her synaesthetic abilities? The honest answer must be ‘no’. Both L’Ascension and Dark Fire exhibit traditional perspective and an obvious single, fixed viewpoint in which a horizon is either clearly visible or implied. Stockhausen’s Poles comes closest to the idea of motion through space and time with lines that weave across the paper, easily interpretable as sound curves or travelling waves, but it still presents single-point perspective and a static observer. In other words, the actual appearance reveals that they are an imaginative response to the music, rather than depicting any synaesthetic perceptions occurring during a performance. There is a spiritual dimension to synaesthesia. Theosophical writings often promote the belief that ideas, sounds, emotions and events can manifest as visible auras (2) and, in fact, there is evidence in the form of ‘person-colour’ synaesthesia in which individuals with this unusual variant see coloured forms surrounding a face or a body, especially when the person under observation gives rise to powerful emotions. However, person-colour synaesthesia appears to be unrelated to the clairvoyant’s ability to see auras; phenomenologically the two are quite distinct. (3) So, Colquhoun had several varieties of synaesthesia. Furthermore, in addition to these unusual connections we also know that she had heightened responses to ordinary sensory stimuli, in particular to sound. She makes this clear in her book The Living Stones. She states, for example, that she was driven to leave her home in the Lamorna Valley by her extreme sensitivity to noise. In her will Colquhoun left a share of her intellectual rights to the Noise Abatement Society, inadvertently plunging curators and publishers into chaos ever since. The way she encountered the world, with all her linked perceptual and cognitive experiences, may sound odd to us, but it was entirely normal for her. It was just the way she was. From birth, she inhabited a highly enriched sensory world, tuned to a slightly different frequency to most of us. Combine all that with her distinctive world view and her artistic and literary skills, and we have one of the most astonishing creative talents of the mid 20 Century. Notes (1) The Until Twelve vignettes are in a folder in the archives at Tate Britain, indexed as TGA 929/2/1/68/1. Some have been published in Shillitoe, R. (ed) Medea’s Charms. Selected Shorter Writings of Ithell Colquhoun. London, Peter Owen, 2019, pp. 258-64 (2) See Thought Forms by the theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, in print more or less continuously since its first publication in 1901. (3) Milán, E.G. et al. “Auras in mysticism and synaesthesia: A comparison”. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 258–268, 2012. Further reading “What colour is three o’clock? Ithell Colquhoun and synaesthesia.” The Enquiring Eye, Journal of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. 2022. Issue 8, 23-30. https://artcornwall.org/features/Richard_Shillitoe/Ithell_Colquhoun_and_Synaesthesia.htm April 2026