David Hockney’s synesthesia is unusual among painters for where it shows up. Scholars who studied his case note that his canvases and photography carry little of it; the trait poured instead into his stage design. For his opera and ballet productions, including his celebrated Metropolitan Opera triple bill of 1981 and Turandot in 1992, Hockney worked from the music itself, deriving the sets’ colors and lighting from what he saw while listening, and he spoke of sets needing to be true to the music.
Art historians who examined the designs describe them as documentation of the experience: color choices and recurring forms consistent with synesthetic perception, applied with a painter’s control.
Hockney died in June 2026 at 88. His case belongs to the self-described tier on the strength of his own accounts of designing from the heard color of a score, with the scholarly literature adding the corroboration that casual celebrity lists lack.