Open Sorcery

Tag: synesthesia

  • I couldn’t figure out my cross posting program for fucking EVERRRRR,

    so have this process video for a new art piece I made a few days ago to celebrate me getting my shit together lol

    -Allēna

    #digitalart #synesthesia #hotpink #unseriousart #digitalpainting #queerart #intuitiveart #transmasc

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  • I went to the poetry workshop with Emerson again today and as such, I come bearing gifts.

    This was the result of a TTRPG roll and it’s called “everything’s coming up lavender”

    i was 17 when you first came to me
    mind threatening to unravel in shades of crimson

    now i swear everything's coming up lavender and
    golden brown, i'm much madder now and 
    while i can't say things are fine in this pit 
    of snakes we live in, at least i feel
    somewhat safe now that i found the melody i
    was looking for 

    the problem is that i sought you high and
    low in all the wrong places, wrote my best songs
    and lines to all the wrong people
    it's sad to say that you found me at my worst, but
    you loved me anyway

    i'm a stubborn piece of shit and i know 
    you know that, so are you
    that's part of why i love you so fucking much
    neither of us know when to quit when we know exactly what we want

    so are we living the dream? maybe not yet
    but do we have the grit to get there?
    absofuckinglutely. and one thing's for certain
    i know i will never be bored again

    so thank you. thank you for not
    giving up on this raging bitch 
    thank you for sticking it out because
    i loved you endlessly then and i love you endlessly now

    -Allēna 8/3/2025

    Here's the TTRPG if you want to snag a copy for yourself!
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  • A golden gossamer

    I appear to be in a very Songs: Ohia mood today, a band Eight turned me onto. This song feels like nearly transparent gossamer waves of gold at sunset to me:

    Happy listening. Somewhere in the afterlife, Jason Molina is raising a PBR in a shit dive bar. -Allēna

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  • I sortaaaa forgot what life was a few days back and gave Opensorceryy.co a redesign, but I realized I never posted the actual art piece that is the site background!

    Enjooooyyyyy. ✨

    -Allēna

    #digitalart #abstract #psychedelic #synesthesia #feral #queerjoy #queerart

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  • Are you even a timeblind artist until you’ve painted several neon melting clocks?

    I’m kidding.

    But I do paint melting clocks on occasion. Like this one.

    Hehehe….

  • My Brainhole… Visualized

    A bit of context: my friend mk (it/its) posted an incredible thought piece on its Substack on feral anarchy, what it means, etc., and I found it very inspiring. I, too, am quite feral, a synesthete, have zero sense of linear time, and have built my very neuroqueer life from a place of loosely organized chaos. So I decided to make art that aimed to describe my experience a bit. Therefore… Have this!

    Many of the words in this art piece are from my poetry, hehe.

    I highly recommend reading mk’s work if you do not and following/subscribing! It’s doing great things.

    -Lazarus ✨

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  • Synesthetic Curation

    Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Thanks to a hefty dose of caffeine last night and apparent executive dysfunction surrounding sleep, I re-downloaded the Pinterest app in an attempt to express what the fuck my brainhole does when I feel emotions or encounter a fascinating or special person. As I’ve said before in some other posts, I’m a synesthete and stroke survivor, which leads to my brain doing some interesting shit especially around emotions that are difficult to put into words. Visual art, therefore, is a much more effective way of getting the point across. While I CAN draw, paint, and create other forms of visual art, the amount of imagery my brain produces in a single minute is damn near incomprehensible even to me, so it makes much more sense to curate existing imagery and create my own when I can’t find anything batshit enough to fit what I need. Pinterest comes in handy for this sort of large scale imagery curation, as it is a visual search engine and quite an efficient one!

    Move over, Google Emoji Combiner. Pinterest to the rescue!

    Here is just a mere sampling of what my brainhole does in response to three of my partners respectively, Zelda, Hawthorne, and Autumn. I’ll post links to their boards, as well. I apologize in advance if any of these images were generated with AI, as  many of the Pin creators don’t specify whether or not they were, and I hate that. I’ll avoid posting any here that are clearly marked as such.

    A small sampling of Zelda’s board. The full thing, thus far, is here.

    A small sampling of Hawthorne’s board. The full board is here.

    Last but certainly not least, here’s a small sampling of Autumn’s board. The full board is here.

    I hope y’all enjoyed this peep into my brainhole. Stay tuned for more magic, esteemed gremlins, very soon…

    -Lazarus ✨

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  • Yay, PTSD Art For The People!

    Hey, peeps. This is Allēna. My PTSD is kicking my ass today, but at least y’all get cool art out of it. We appear to be that special kind of creator that gets even more inspiration when our trauma comes back to kick our ass, taking us from decently prolific to FUCKING ON FIRE creatively in order to cope with the emotional pain of it all. Today has been no exception. First up is a poem that spilled out of me this morning before I went back to sleep for about three hours: 

    Let’s set the scene 
    The year is 2019
    I wake with the dawn and simply try and breathe -

    You give me tools and time and I will build my way through this rage 
    I will sing and chew my way through the bars of 
    this cage

    Five years later and I still can’t sleep
    I still feel stuck with the cards close to my
    concave chest 
    When will the craving subside? 
    When will I stop hungering for more? 
    Nothing short of everything? 

    They couldn’t take my mind
    No matter how hard they tried 
    They couldn’t strip me of the things I’ve seen
    They could never quite dull the hunger in my eyes

    The dawn breaks anew and I lay in a room 
    still trying to spread these battered wings
    surrounded by nothing but windows…

    And then I got inspired again this evening and painted what my synesthesia makes of “Didn’t It Rain” by Songs: Ohia, one of the songs that sonically shaped our album Metacognition. The PTSD attack is pertaining to the events that set off the hot streak that caused Eight to write and record the bulk of Metacognition, so I figured painting a song that he had on repeat at the time would help get some of the emotions out, and it did. I wasn’t present during that time, so I’m essentially having to process someone else’s trauma right now and all I know to do with it is make art and talk about art. I feel like a mess, even though logically I know it’s pretty damn healthy to process shit this way. Here is the painting for y’all:

    Didn’t It Rain by me.

    I’m not really okay, y’all, but I deal with shit like this regularly enough that I know how to get through it safely, and y’all get cool art in the process. I’m over at Emerson’s currently, but once I’m back at Sheik’s I or whoever else is in front will probably drop some more spare room roaring on here. 💛

    Fucking flashbacks.

    Anyway…

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, your traumatized, if hyper-prolific, super-admin. Fuck PTSD up the ass with a Joseph cactus. 😭

  • Two New Synesthetic Art Pieces + A Bit About Unmasking For Us

    Hi, everyone! This is Allēna. I don’t know if “synesthetic” is actually a word, but for the purposes of this post, it is now because I’m tired and I need a word for “pertaining to synesthesia” or else I’ll never get around to writing about a lot of the shit my system makes. I want to write about it sooner rather than later because we’ve been tapping into our synesthesia hard. We’ve also not really been able to write on here much these past few days and I missed it, so even though it’s the ass crack of dawn right now – 3:25 AM as I’m typing this – I’m making a point to write. Our sleep cycle is fucked and so I’m leaping on an idea while I have one.

    I joined a Discord server on a whim the other day that seems to cater pretty heavily towards fellow neurodivergent synesthetes. One of the things users could opt into were reminders to unmask their neurodivergence. I always need those, so I opted into all of them for the hell of it. It’s been working wonders for our creativity over time. Hell, it’s probably why we’ve been writing as much as we have, the server is full of reminders to intentionally tap into queer joy and synesthetic imagery. It feels like home.

    Consequently, these reminders have started getting us to make more visual art. Castor painted this abstract portrait of Sheik yesterday:

    Sheik (2024), by Castor

    And then today, I painted one of our friend Delta’s songs, “Return”:

    Return (2024), by me

    I’ve really missed painting. It’s one of those things that Fang never really understood during our marriage and made me feel like shit about. He couldn’t see the meaning in the colors and placements. It sucked, but I’m glad to be getting back into it now that we’re supported.

    In the coming weeks, we’re going to be playing around with ways to make DIY pen/paintbrush/pencil grips so that we can hopefully get back to writing longhand and creating traditional art without it fucking killing our joints. We’ve been stuck in executive dysfunction hell. I hope my doctors can get my ADHD meds refilled so that I can actually do things in a timely manner again instead of feeling like I blink and fourteen hours pass. At least I get to make cool art out of it..

    Anyway, stay tuned for more magic, y’all!

    -Allēna