The Painter Who Hears Sound In Color

Featured on huffingtonpost.com

Jack Coulter sees his own heartbeat. People without his condition hear their own heartbeat, and feel it, and Coulter does that, too. But to him, it also radiates color, like the violet glow you see when you look into darkness with an infrared camera. 

Coulter has synesthesia, a rare neurological condition where stimulation of one sense creates an impression by another sense, like hearing a noise and seeing it manifested in color. On stormy nights, he has a recurring dream where he is enveloped in vivid color formations he describes as crystalline holograms that pulsate with the sound of raindrops hitting his window. Asleep and awake, the harsher the sound, the harsher the visualization. Other people with synesthesia experience it differently, reporting an ability to taste color or feel music brushing against their bodies. It's a personal condition.

Working as an artist in Northern Ireland, Coulter creates technicolor paintings with sticks, knives, broken glass and other found objects, coaxing the cheapest paint available into rhythmic formations. Coulter's art has attracted an Instagram following of over 50,000, and he says that prints sold on his website are snapped up so quickly that he's run out of printing materials before.

On the Internet, his fans are reduced to numbers, and he can forget each one corresponds to a real person, although their individual messages remind him otherwise. Coulter is shy. From a very early age, he realized that he experienced the world differently than his friends and family. "I lived in my own world," the artist wrote to The Huffington Post. 

Now, as an adult, he prefers not to speak on the phone. HuffPost interviewed Coulter over email, receiving in his responses both self-reflection and meandering credos. The 21-year-old isn't short on his eccentrically worded beliefs. (A sample: "Preconceived notions asphyxiate reflections of pure expression.") Below is that interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Click here to read the full article including the interview.