Missouri artist paints the music she hears

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Kerry Hirth always enters her art studio with a sheet of music in her hand.

A mild smell of dry pastels and chalk fills the studio space. Colorful sketches are scattered on the floor and pinned to the walls, looking vivid under the morning sunlight.

Hirth puts the music sheet on her work table and studies it carefully. Sometimes she will play the music on an upright piano -- a Scarlatti sonata, a Bach prelude or perhaps an Irish fiddle tune.

Then she searches her chalk box for specific colors to match the composition and starts to draw multicolored bands on a piece of paper. Gradually, striped sections of bright colors fill the paper. People sometimes tell her the drawings look like bar codes.

Hirth paints music in blocks of colors, reading left to right, just as a piece of music unfolds on paper. The artist is said to have synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one sensory experience will stimulate another sense.

Kerry Hirth explains how she based one of her music paintings on German artist Franz Marc's work to other members of the Columbia Art League during Artist Critique Group on Nov. 21 in Columbia, Missouri. (Yuting Jiang ~ Columbia Missourian)

With Hirth, it is colors and sounds. Others with synesthesia might feel or taste colors; still others may associate letters and numbers with colors.

Although it has been described for centuries, scientific examination of the phenomenon is fairly recent. According to the National Institutes of Health, research has focused on why and how the associations are made, their patterns and stimuli.

Although still somewhat mysterious, synesthesia does have a rich history in the arts. A number of musicians, authors and visual artists have integrated it into their work.

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin is an example. In his masterpiece "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire," Scriabin envisioned the music being performed on an instrument with a keyboard of light that could also reflect colors.

Contemporary British artist David Hockney displays a more sophisticated connection among music, shape and color in his opera set designs.

Others who have reported synesthetic experiences are the artist Vincent Van Gogh, composer Leonard Bernstein, violinist Itzhak Perlman, rocker Eddie Van Halen and "Lolita" author Vladimir Nabakov.

Hirth specifically sees color in musical harmonies, but not melodies, and creates art based on those visions.

"Music is a part of hearing, but for me also a part of seeing," she said.

The relationship is strong enough for her to associate colors with chords. The D major chord is yellow; G major is a turquoise blue; and F major -- her favorite -- is a vermilion, the color she often sees in central Missouri where she grew up.

"There are a handful of harmonies, maybe eight or nine different harmonies -- I consistently associate with the same thing," she said.

Hirth was born on an 88-acre family farm in Osage County. She says she recognized an ability to see colors in music when she was 3 or 4, about the time she started to play the piano.

As a little girl, she said, the connection was so natural and obvious in her mind that she thought everyone had the same experience.

"I didn't even realized that my experience of music was different until I was around 37," she said.

After graduating from MU with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a law degree, she worked as an attorney for the Center for Disability and Elder Law in Chicago. The big city lifestyle startled her, she said, but it also pushed her to take risks.

One afternoon, she dug out a box of colored chalk from 10 or 15 years earlier and decided to sketch a piece of music from a Bach prelude. It would be a gift for her husband, Andy, to put in his law office where he sometimes clocked 80-hour weeks.

"I wanted him to have something in his office because I didn't see him that much," Hirth said. "Let him know that I was thinking about him."

Her husband's reaction was dramatic. He had no idea she had a special association between color and sound.

"How are you doing it?" he asked.

"That's just the color that it is," she replied. "I can't explain it. I just know the colors."

She played the Bach prelude to demonstrate the harmonies she recorded as sections of colors in her painting.

"This is D major, and this is G," Hirth said, as she pointed to the equivalent colors.

The couple searched online about the experience, and Hirth discovered "synesthesia" for the first time.

Hirth continued to paint music as a hobby. At about the same time, she began taking an art studio class and then exhibited her work at The Art Center Highland Park in suburban Chicago. She was surprised when she sold one of her works.

Encouraged, Hirth began to participate in more art shows. Since 2007, she has been included in group shows around the country, as well as in Paris and Toronto, and she has staged two solo shows.

One, "Sonatas From a Climate of Sunlight and Warmth," was held in November 2011, and the second, "This Land is Your Land," was held in July 2013, both at ARC Gallery and Educational Foundation in Chicago.

In 2010, she and her husband moved back to Missouri, and Hirth now paints full time while preparing for a third solo show next year in Chicago.

She said her earliest paintings are more rigorous representations of the music, and the later ones more interpretive.

"It's analysis of music," she said. The goal was to "keep it true." But she doesn't want to be confined.

Longing for more freedom and new directions, she has recently turned to nature for inspiration. She has done several pieces that express the sounds and sights of the forest, for example. She may use color bands to reflect a sunset at Finger Lakes State Park or a deer drinking water from a creek or layered rocks in desert.

The result is work that has become more complex and interesting, said Judith Joseph, Hirth's art teacher in Highland Park.

"It's very unique," she said. "It's not just music anymore."

Abstract art is always difficult to explain in words, let alone the special association Hirth experiences with music and color. But as her work has evolved, so has her skill at explaining the process. What really did the trick were her sketches.

Before finishing a painting, Hirth often makes three to six sketches that contain the same color pattern but appear more loose and casual. She draws lines to represent the colors of different harmonies and uses a pencil to mark significant features of rhythm, melody notes and lyrics.

She also makes notes of elements from nature, perhaps the dark blue of a late-night sky or silver from a bird feather. She said the sketch is like a map of her mind.

"There is something very free about the sketch," Joseph said. "It just shows the energy of the process."

Persuaded by Joseph and others in her art classes, Hirth began to show the sketches along with the completed works. Unexpectedly, the sketches have become popular.

Seeing sketches beside the finished pieces sparked people's curiosity about her approach and improved the understanding of her art.

"I was really surprised the first time someone asked me if they could buy a sketch," Hirth said. "I was like sure, yes, if you want it. You can take it."

The first sketch was sold for $25. Now the price tag can be as much as $750.

She admits that she now values sketches far more than she once did. "I threw them away, or I rolled them up," she confessed.

Not only does the sketch reveal the artist's mind, it also conveys certain aesthetic values. Compared with a polished painting, Joseph said, they add energy and are visually exciting.

In a sketch, people see her effort not only to record music but also to play with color, mood, land and nature.

"It's more like an improvised street dance with a formal ballet. You love both for different reasons," Joseph said.

Her solo show, "This Land is Your Land," was built around the well-known Woody Guthrie tune. Hirth took advantage of its simple structure and rustic traditions to present different renditions of the song in each of her paintings.

"Her paintings are like an orchestra of color," said Richard Dutton, an artist friend. "When you look at the way she does all those bands, it's like you can see and hear an orchestration of color, the drums, violins and the various things."

Hirth's next solo show will be in May 2015 at the ARC Gallery, chiefly featuring her sketches.

"I'd like to include some large-scale significant paintings, but the focus of it will be on the process of the painting," Hirth said.

Hirth now sells around 24 paintings a year, not enough to support her art but enough to motivate her.

"I don't make enough to survive," she said. "But I decided I was a better artist than most things I can do."