"She’ll describe a mint green as 'a color that makes me thirsty,' or perceive 'crushed raspberry' where others might see fuchsia."

"'I like to mix and let them insult each other, have an argument,' she has said, of colors, as though they were guests at a dinner party... 'The color of my childhood was strawberry milkshake,' Mahdavi said recently. She was born in 1962, in Tehran, to an Iranian father and an Egyptian mother.... Iran is one of the wellsprings of Mahdavi’s style. 'I love the contrast between the brutality of the city and the softness of this,' she said one day, showing me a photograph she had taken of a bourgeois living room, its coffee table laden with textiles, pattern upon pattern, and bowls of fruit. Iran, to her, is mirror-work, marquetry, turquoise, faded glory. The country also has the advantage of being comparatively lightly touristed, giving her access to a creative person’s most valuable resource: things that not everyone else has seen. 'Iran is inspirational, because the taste is a bit funny,' she told me. 'They’re very free with their associations, and can often go down the wrong route, like kitsch, but that’s where you have the best associations.' [Her client Adel] Abdessemed described Mahdavi’s style as 'a cross between the chromatism of the films of Almodóvar and a form of childlike and joyous orientalism inspired by Iran.' He said, 'She creates a fantastical version of the East that doesn’t exist in the East, a sort of dreamed image.'"

From "India Mahdavi, Virtuoso of Color/The interior designer’s polychromatic dreamlands."

Beautiful job on that Google doodle for Wassily Kandinsky's 148th birthday.

The Guardian says:

Like symphonies, Kandinsky’s great abstract paintings speak directly to our senses and feelings. Their constellations of mysterious marks are like waves of sound that trigger emotions. For him, the world they pointed towards was a spiritual realm, a hidden truth.

The Telegraph says:

Despite the lack of medical proof for Kandinsky's synaesthesia, the correlation between sound and colour was a lifelong preoccupation for the artist. He recalled hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments.... Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow: "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."

The Independent:

Fifty seven of his paintings were confiscated by the Nazis during a raid on the Bauhaus art school and were later put on show in the State-sponsored exhibit “Degenerate Art” in 1937 before being destroyed.

I recommend Kandinsky's book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" (free Kindle edition).

"'If I don't like somebody's name... I won't like them very much,' he explains unabashedly."

"My name, Audrey, for example, tastes strongly of tinned tomatoes. 'If I actually had to speak with you every day, I'd try and shorten [your name] somehow,' Wannerton tells me."

"I have his form of synesthesia, and having watched the video I was impressed by how effectively he conveyed the experience."

"In listening to a piece of music (or playing one) the colors sometimes cycle through very quickly, and sometimes cycle very slowly. I don't "see" them with my eyes, the way the video changes color. Instead, I 'see' the colors with my mind's eye."