This week I spoke to artist, Ciele Beau about a busy year of mural-painting and the fascinating ways she uses synesthesia to create truly original art.

Ciele’s journey as a professional artist began by completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The University of Victoria in 2013, earning a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Art History. After receiving her degree, she moved to Vancouver and spent the next seven years building up her portfolio in the evenings and on weekends, while she worked day jobs to support herself. By 2015, she had started doing more freelance work, and while these jobs often didn’t pay well, she says that each one was a valuable learning experience to get better as an artist. As a freelancer, design jobs were often more easily available than illustrative jobs, and she soon found that she had reached the limit of what she could teach herself. Ciele decided to continue her education at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017, earning a certificate in Design to supplement the more traditional training she had received from her former degree. With her foundation solidified, Ciele transitioned to becoming a full-time artist in 2018 and began holding her own solo shows, featuring in part, work inspired by and created with synesthesia.

Synesthesia Art

While studying in Victoria, Ciele was tasked with an assignment in which she had to create a painting inspired by a song. She picked “Pro Nails“, by Kid Sister as her song, and ended up painting a piece that she describes as “this crazy mess of just shapes and colour,” but something that reflected her feelings when listening to the song. While certainly abstract to the uneducated blog writer, Ciele said that experiencing this array of visual stimulation was and still is very normal to her when she listens to music. However, this experience proved difficult to explain to the other students in her class. During the class critique of their work, Ciele said that “I was so proud of it, but nobody got it,” as many others fell back on painting literal representations of their songs’ subject matter. Later that year, Ciele was approached by one of her peers who had learned about synesthesia, and had been reminded of her painting. At the time, Ciele didn’t know what synesthesia was, but after doing some research she realized that she had been living with it all her life. In fact, she realized she has multiple forms of synesthesia, but for the purposes of her art, she focuses on colour synesthesia. For Ciele, this means that when she listens to music, she feels colour, “kind of the same way that you would feel emotion…on a chemical level”. This feeling manifests as tangible colours and shapes that she is able to translate into two main approaches to synesthesia art, colour frequencies and chromatic forms.

Beginning with colour frequencies, this is a method in which she translates sheet music into a grid pattern filled with the colours that she feels when she listens to the song. This creates a visual blueprint of the song, featuring a specific range of colours and palette arranged in time with the music. Of course, it would be an oversimplification to describe it as simply a grid, but the end result spans the entire song with different line weights to correspond with the varying notes in the song. Conversely, chromatic forms are an opportunity to translate both the colour as well as the shapes she feels, creating a piece with more movement and less structure than when working in colour frequencies. This results in a product with more fluidity and represents the song in a visually different way than the former technique. When she first starting using synesthesia in her work, Ciele would listen to whichever song she was working with until she was finished with the piece. She says that this became quite overwhelming on a sensory level, as well as the basic fatigue that will come when listening to any song for that long. She has since refined her workflow; when creating a colour frequency piece she will listen to it only until she is able to create a colour palette for the song. From there she is able to use that palette to create her grid, without needing to listen to the song live for the entire process. Similarly, her current technique for chromatic forms is to listen to the song until she creates a sketch of the painting to serve as the plan for her piece. This also serves as a starting point from which she can continue her work without relying on the song. Looking back at how her workflow has changed, Ciele says that when creating her piece in university, “I remember kind of going a little bit insane” listening to the song for that long, so she is certainly happy to have developed a more sustainable practice.

Mural-Painting

This past year was an exciting year for Ciele as she was able to complete several murals, something she had not had the opportunity to do so before. In the past, she had found it difficult to gain experience in large murals due to the difficulty of finding clients with enough trust to allow her to cover an entire wall, as well as the corresponding funds for the volume of paint necessary to complete it. But in the spring of 2020, Ciele received an opportunity as businesses began boarding up their storefronts as the lockdown in Vancouver began to take full effect. She was approached by the Gastown Business Improvement Society to paint a mural on a storefront, with the caveat that it would be unpaid work. While this deterred some artists, Ciele saw an opportunity to gain mural experience, but also create a piece unfettered from any restrictions from the client. Inspired by the proliferation of blue medical gloves in our world, she painted a blue hand taking a bath, reflecting her affinity to “add a little bit of humour” to her work. From the success of this mural, Ciele was selected to be part of the “Make Art While Apart” initiative from the Vancouver Mural Festival, taking her talents to decorate the South Granville area. For this installation, she painted a blue alien covered in Cheeto dust, featuring the quote “You’re doing amazing Sweetie,” from Keeping Up with the Kardashians lore. A classical pairing of imagery and messaging. Finally, Ciele earned a spot in the Vancouver Mural Festival’s installation in the River District, during the run of the festival itself. She painted a girl with bright blue skin, flanked by two coffee cups and the words “Wake Up!” across the entire piece. Every artist has a blue period right? Ciele says that this last mural has two meanings behind it, with the obvious one being caffeine’s place in our morning rituals. But in addition, she wanted to reflect on the social movements that heavily defined 2020, and comment on the world awakening from “that unconscious sort of slumber that people have been in”.

Ciele says that the number of resources and knowledge on synesthesia is vastly different compared to when she began exploring it back in art school. Now that she understands what is happening, she has been able to harness it and further expand her breadth as a creative. Reflecting on her path to a full-time artist, even though she fully committed to life as an artist just a few years ago, the years leading up to it, along with now living with a partner in the music industry have created a “creative, isolated bubble” in which she has lived in for quite a while. And with the bubbles playing such a large role in our lives over the past year, wouldn’t you want yours to be a little bit more artistic as well?

Check out more of Ciele’s work on her website, and follow her on Instagram and Facebook for more content. She has several exciting upcoming projects that I won’t share just yet, so stay tuned!

Follow A Musing on Instagram for more content on Ciele and the other creatives in this series.

And don’t forget to check our last interview with creative, Nadine Nevitt.

-BF.