The Call to Art

When I try to recall the first time I realized my place was in art, three particular items pop into my mind: a little red plastic chair, a sheet of lined paper, and a pencil. Soon the memory unfolds.

I was about four years old, sitting in that red chair, holding the blank paper in front of me with one hand, and the pencil in the other. On the outside appearance, I might have seemed relatively calm, but inside, mentally and almost physically, a huge rush from an inexplicable source was building. A massive wave of creative energy welled up within me, and I felt I needed to draw something, to release this pervading sensation. For the first few moments, I didn’t know what to draw, but I waited until that big idea would reach the surface. The instant it came, felt like a “eureka” realization:

The number One is dark-blue, male, and married to Two, who’s female, reddish-orange, and feisty yet motherly. They have kids starting numerically from Three and likely extending beyond Ten, where there are also other members of what seems to be a royal family, all of numbers, each with his/her own color(s) and personality.

As I discovered this extraordinarily novel idea, I thought it was awesome and immediately began drawing these numerical “characters.” As I began expressing my visuals on paper, the idea of the lives of these entities got more detailed in my mind, as if my mind was telling a story, and I was trying to catch up with it in documenting the story/stories in my drawing. What I hadn’t realized then—and wouldn’t until I reached age 21—was that I was experiencing my first incidence of synesthesia, a condition in which one sensory perception triggers another (or others) simultaneously and involuntarily. In this instance, my sense of number as a symbol was instantly associated with a sense of color, as well as a sense of personality.
 
Now you might be wondering why I’ve written in length about my synesthesia in this post, when I started off talking about finding my place in art. The reason is because, it was my synesthetic perceptions that spurred me to pursue art seriously in my life. From such a short moment of time at age four, I instantaneously became aware of a wealth of cliché-challenging, abstract, and literally colorful material that I felt would be best expressed creatively, and lead me to learn more about worlds both within me and surrounding me. Concerning art and the art world, I have since gone on to learn other aspects and techniques, and demonstrate new skills as I have acquired them, but it was only because of my first serendipitous, and fateful, occurrence of synesthesia that I would affirm that, “when I grow up, I’m going to be an artist.”