Do you find that certain words evoke certain flavours for you, or that pieces of music, or days of the week, evoke colours? The name for such a crossing of the senses is synaesthesia. And artist Jane Mackay has been drawing on it, in every sense of every sense, to make a hundred paintings celebrating the music of Benjamin Britten. In November 2026 it will be half a century since Britten died.
Explain or compare?
I interviewed Jane at the Pond Gallery in Snape Maltings, the venue that was built for Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival. The paintings were exhibited there in June. I’m a little synaesthetic myself. My first question was whether, in interviews, Jane had to spend more time explaining what synaesthesia was, or in comparing notes about synaesthetic experiences.
“If I meet a synaesthete, we never stop talking. There are about 99 types of synaesthesia. If you talk to a synaesthete, they usually know about it all. If you talk to someone who’s not heard the word, then you go back to basics. If it’s a musician, they often know about it, but is a trait that has only been researched for the last few decades.”
Jane’s applied her gifts to other composers besides Britten. I asked her what these people thought of her response to their music.
“I sort of stop at Britten and Tippett. I’m sometimes asked to do pop or jazz or folk songs, and I love some contemporary composers. But I specialise in more 20th century, like Britten, than 21st century. Also, I usually work from recordings, unless there’s a live concert. So I haven’t been speaking to Philip Glass. I would love to!” Composer Michael Tippett died in 1998; Philip Glass, still living, will turn 90 next year.
Throwing away the stethoscope
Jane’s previous career was as a doctor. She qualified in 1970, and worked as a volunteer in Papua New Guinea, and later as a GP in Southwark. She ran the medical and artistic careers in parallel until the millennium, and then switched to full-time pursuit of art. She marked the change by throwing her stethoscope in the Thames.
“People took photos. Nobody filmed it. I went with about four friends. We had champagne. Somebody threw their wedding ring in at the same time. I tested my stethoscope in the bath, because I didn’t want it floating ignominiously off to the Thames Barrier. Somebody said recently the mudlarks might have picked it up. I’d engraved it with my dates as a doctor, and then I put ‘Artist 1.1.00-‘.”
I asked if she’d made similar gestures for other big life changes. “I don’t know that I have. Working in Papua New Guinea with VSO was a huge life change, but I didn’t mark it in any way. I wrote 485 air letters back home, some of which have been preserved, but I didn’t make any symbolic gesture.”
99% support
How did family and friends respond to the artistic switch?
“I would say almost 99% supportive. I make an absolute priority of looking after my own mailing list of people who are very supportive – clients, friends, family who’ve bought pictures or collect them. I’m fairly meticulous about that. In the medical world – there were a lot of musicians in my year. Nine of us that qualified in 1970 met up for this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. Some people, right at the beginning, said ‘That’s a bit rash, you’re throwing away your medical career, and it’s rather the unknown.’ But I don’t think I’ve had any really negative thing. I did it very slowly. Apart from throwing away the stethoscope, I phased out of medicine, and I phased into selling pictures.”
Jane’s synaesthesia
Synaesthesia has been the driver behind much of Jane’s artistic life. It comes as a surprise to learn that the condition itself hasn’t much changed for her over the years. “My days-of-the-week colours have absolutely not moved. My sister’s synaesthesia has different colours. We used to argue about them. She was wrong, of course, she thought I was wrong. Friday could never be anything but black and white check. Saturday looks like a whole lot of forget-me-nots. Monday white. Tuesday and Thursday sort of interleaving, smeary, bluey green things. They’ve never changed. But I didn’t listen to Britten when I was five years old. You build on it. Some things might get a bit blurred or less stark, but they don’t change really.”
The book of the exhibition
Jane found the exhibition thrilling. Seven of her pictures were hung for a time in Britten’s own composing studio. The exhibition itself has now ended, but every one of the paintings in it is reproduced, with facing-page commentary by Andrew Plant, in the book Painting Britten: 100 visions of the music. The commentary does a helpful job of explaining the art: relating it to the structure of the music, the images and drama of the words that many of the musical pieces carry, and the highly individual influence of Jane’s own synaesthetic response.
Details of the book are here. It costs £20 and can be obtained by emailing the publisher: bitternpress@musician.org.
Jane’s intoductory essay ends: “Having now completed 100 paintings of Britten’s music, I did call this project my ‘swan-song’. And yet, I feel I have really only just started…”
We’re looking forward to more!
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