Not Gone, Just Waiting. A conversation about SYNESTHESIA, art and music.
We're sitting outside a bakery in Novato. It’s the perfect temperature, the kind where people linger over coffee instead of rushing off. Ours arrive with little hearts in the foam, I just hope that it’s strong. Charity laughs when I ask her about what she's been up to lately… there's exhaustion underneath it.
She hasn't had time to inventory everything yet. She's just been moving — box after box, piece after piece — trying to make sense of a lifetime of art work now spread across four climate-controlled storage units down the road. Paintings stacked carefully, sculptures tucked into corners. Tools, materials, fragments of process. Not organized. Not cataloged. Just all there, waiting.
George didn't just paint. He built things.
His sculptures look like they're carved from stone, but they're not. They're wood and glue, held together entirely by pressure — no nails, just clamps, force, and an understanding of exactly how materials behave. He would texture them, spray them, work them until they took on a solid, almost architectural presence. For a long time, many of them were dark, nearly stone-like, absorbing light. Then, toward the end of his life, for whatever reason, he started going back over them and spraying them gold. Not delicately. Completely.
Details that had been hidden began to emerge. Edges caught the light differently. Forms that had been subtle became unmistakable.
While moving one of the larger pieces, Charity found a tag that had fallen off. It read Godzilla. She smiles when she says it.
For George, synesthesia wasn't occasional or poetic. It was constant.
Sound and sight were fused. Everything he heard — music, voices, background noise, the hum of a room — produced color, shape, and movement. Conversations had color. Words had color. Letters had color. Entire languages had their own visual identities. He once told Charity that Chinese felt abrupt to him and appeared mostly brown. English and Spanish were different — because he understood them, he could see each conversation as a unified color field, but simultaneously he could see each individual word, each letter within it, layered and moving at once. Not one image. Multiple layers, happening together.
He described it like a screen in front of him that never turned off.
Their home had a lot of black in it because black quieted the visual noise. Sometimes he would say he was tired of seeing and go to bed — sleep was the only way to shut it off. Crowds were overwhelming. Concerts could become too much. Charity learned to watch him. If he got quiet, she knew it was time to go.
When George created, he would listen to a piece of music over and over again until he could take what he called a snapshot of what he was seeing in his mind. Then he would trace it and paint it. The colors weren't choices. They were dictated. The shapes weren't invented. They were translations. In his mind everything was three-dimensional, layered, moving — but when he painted, he had to compress that into two dimensions. And even flattened, the work still holds that depth. You can stand in front of a piece for years and still find something new. The music he listened to could range from Mozart to Led Zeppelin.
He was trained in architecture. He loved geometry, physics, form, and function. He spoke seven languages, and when he learned something, it stayed. You could almost see him searching through his mind when you asked him something. He always had a sketchbook with him. Always. From the time he was young, painting was just part of how he moved through the world — and you can see that in the work, the way it spans phases and decades, each one distinct, each one unmistakably his.
It had always been there. As a child, he received alphabet blocks and immediately colored them the way they were supposed to be — he didn't understand that other people didn't see them the same way. That realization came later, when he asked his brother what color a number was and got confusion in return. For a long time, he didn’t have a name for it. That didn't come until college, when he was given a page of numbers and asked to find all the twos. He finished almost instantly. When they asked how, he said they were yellow. Researchers took interest. He was written about, in books and his synesthesia was even studied at Cambridge.
Charity mentions casually as she sips her latte, that George wasn't afraid of dying. Then she goes deeper.
He had come home exhausted one afternoon in Mexico City and laid down to rest. His girlfriend at the time was home, reading. He was just going to grab a nap before a night shift. The next thing he knew, he was outside his body, looking down at himself — not confused, not afraid, just completely aware. His perspective had opened in every direction at once, front, back, all around, simultaneously. He realized he could think himself somewhere and simply be there — he thought of a particular tree and immediately, he was at the tree. Then he was moving, not walking, not floating, but pulled at a speed so fast that he couldn't describe it, toward a distant point of light that didn't seem to get closer no matter how fast he went. He said it felt like it went on forever.
Until it didn't.
The light opened into what he described as a crystalline city — structures that felt alive, luminous, almost architectural but beyond anything we understand. What stayed with him wasn't just what it looked like. It was what it felt like. Love. Overwhelming, all-encompassing, beyond anything he could fully explain. He compared it to a mother's love for her child, multiplied infinitely, and said even that fell short. There was a presence — something like a voice, something like a father figure, steady and certain, a presence that didn't need to explain itself. It told him he had to go back, that it wasn’t his time.
He didn't want to go back. He argued — then he was shown his entire life, every major thing still to come, and his response was essentially: that looks great, don't care, I want to stay. The godlike presence didn't budge.
Then he was back above his body, and he could see the thin silver cord connecting the two, crown to crown. If he could just grab it and cut it, he thought, they'd have to keep him. But every time he reached, it floated just out of range. And then he felt himself being pulled in — headfirst, the wrong way, upside down — and he's thinking, you're putting me in wrong. His astral body settling back into his physical one felt tight and heavy and strange, like something gooey he couldn't quite fit into. For months afterward, his baby toe felt like it wasn't all the way in, like a finger stuck in a wet glove that won't release.
He told people about it. He was so certain, so lit up by it. His family — his father, his uncles and aunts, most of them doctors and psychiatrists — sent him to see someone. He told the psychiatrist: I'm not crazy, this really happened.Eventually he just stopped talking about it. The world wasn't ready to hear it, and he knew it.
But it stayed with him. For the rest of his life, he would sometimes sense something was about to happen — a door cracking open, a glimpse of something he'd been shown — and then it would slam shut before he could hold onto it. Close, and then gone. He carried those flashes quietly, the way you carry something you can't quite explain and have stopped trying to.
He carried it with him every day after that. It didn't make him detached. It made everything deeper. But it removed the fear.
We leave the bakery and drive over to the storage units.
The first thing I notice is the color. Charity is wearing a bright red top with warm orange tones and white pants, and the units behind her are painted almost the exact same shade — not faded, vivid, like they've just been done. She notices it too and laughs. So exact it almost feels intentional. I find myself wondering what George would have thought of that.
Inside, the space is dense. Sculptures stacked and leaning, paintings layered tightly, flashes of color everywhere. She shows me the crystal city pieces — the structures he built from what he saw during that experience. They feel imagined and engineered at the same time, like he was trying to bring something from another realm into physical form. Charity looks at one of them for a moment and says quietly, "I bet that's where he is right now."
Then she points out another series: the Jackson Pollock dream paintings.
After watching a film about Pollock's life, George had been thinking about him. At first, almost dismissively — wondering what all the fuss was about, whether there was much to it. Then Pollock started showing up in his dreams. Not once. Not vaguely. Every night for two weeks, an ongoing conversation. Pollock challenged him, almost daring him: if you think it's so easy, you try it. So George did. The pieces still carry his intelligence and structure, but there's a looseness in them too, a different kind of movement. As if Pollock gave him permission to wrestle with chaos — and George made it entirely his own.
In the middle of all of it, she tells me how they met.
A client had been insisting: you have to meet George, you have to meet George. Charity went to the party with her mother, who was visiting. The whole night passed and she never saw him. As they were leaving, the hostess stopped them — they hadn't met George yet. Charity joked: "Where is this guy? The imaginary George?"
Then he appeared.
When he stepped into the circle, Charity describes it like a movie where the room fades and everyone disappears. She reached out to shake his hand — and suddenly there was a pink tunnel between them. It startled her so much she thought something might be wrong with her, like she was having a stroke, or like something had been in the punch. George was completely calm. Elegant. Composed. He shook her hand and said, "Hello, how do you do?" in that old-world way of his, while she was internally trying to understand what had just happened.
What she didn't know was that he had followed her to the door and was watching her leave.
She hadn't given him her number. The phone rang anyway.
NPR was playing in the background — Click and Clack, and some goofy hillbilly song. Charity covered the phone and told her mother to turn it off so he wouldn't think they were a bunch of hicks. When she got back on, he asked if she didn't like country music. She said no, she was more of a jazz fan. She could hear the relief in his voice.
When she saw him again, he was standing on the stairs in an Armani suit with a beautiful Brancali tie, smelling incredible, impossibly handsome, introducing himself in that elegant, old-world way. She remembers thinking how smart he was, almost intimidatingly so — as the conversation went on, she felt herself becoming exponentially dumber, reduced to words like gee and wow and cool. Then he told her he was an artist. She asked what his work was based on. He said synesthesia. Charity had just read about it in a science magazine. She practically raised her hand with relief: I know what that is. George looked at her a little skeptically. That same day, they went to see his art. The same art she's now moving into storage.
We keep walking through the units. The gold pieces catch the light and feel alive. Some twist like DNA. Others rise like stairways. He had been told during his near-death experience that he would be surrounded by gold at the end of his life, and later — sitting on the couch surrounded by the pieces he had painted gold — he remembered it. He looked around and realized that was exactly what had happened.
His ashes are in a large Nestlé Quik jar with cocoa powder on top. He loved hot cocoa every night — Nestlé Quik, specifically — and that's exactly how he wanted it.
Some of George's guitars are going to kids through The Aragon Foundation. And on May 9th, one of his sculptures and one of his paintings will be auctioned at the Foundation's gala — an evening supporting music, art, and dance education for underserved children in Marin. Pieces that came from a man who spent his whole life translating what he saw into something the rest of us could almost understand, now finding their way to children who might be just beginning to find their own language for the world.
At one point Charity steps back, looks around, and says it's not doing the work justice being here. It needs to be seen.
Standing there, it's hard to disagree. Everything he saw, everything he translated, everything he tried to show — it's sitting in storage. Not gone. Just waiting.
You can watch the full interview here:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/fTLBcEfJNp4
Part 2: https://youtu.be/qZpCq6iMR-k
George’s art: https://george-sanen.pixels.com