Jack Coulter: Painting sound
/London based artist Jack Coulter, 21, has a form of Synaesthesia, a rare neurological phenomenon that causes him to ‘hear’ colour, resulting in a sensory overload that he finds both draining and beautifully enriching.
Jack Coulter has spent his entire life surrounded by colour. But not the kind of colour you or I see; the spectral vortex that constantly surrounds him is the result of synesthesia - a rare neurological condition which makes staring at the sky a fluorescent experience, and turns the sound of his beating heart into a shade of ultra violet, even the greyest of objects shine like diamonds, so it's no wonder that Jack has also spent his entire life trying to recreate these hallucinations on canvas.
At just 21 years of age, he's already built up a large body of paintings, prints, and photography, featuring in the likes of GQ and on the cover of singer-songwriter SOAK's debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream. Using the cheapest paint available, and applied with things like sticks, broken glass, knives, and even mixed with sand - Jack's paintings are like looking through a kaleidoscope, as each marbled spatter of florescent paint bleeds into the next, its tangibility alluding to the physical forms of colour that Jack has visualised his whole life.
Deconstructing the perception of colour in a world where we routinely experience life through the prism of an Instagram filter, his work appeals to the masses (he already has over 46,000 followers on the social platform). There's also a sense of alienation and isolation bound up within his work, how he operates as an artist, and the fact that he sees things that no one else can see, in other words a loneliness that people can identify with and take comfort in, which is probably why Jack receives so many messages from fans online.
