James Purpura is an American painter creating and exhibiting in Paris, including at the Grand Palais, for the last ten years.

He is a chromaticist who transcribes music onto canvas. Beats, instruments, layering, vocals, and lyrics evoke certain colors and brush strokes, and pieces of music want to express themselves in an infinite number of ever-changing visuals.

The process by which he develops his works is called synesthesia, defined as «a concomitant sensation; especially: a subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated». Music the artist uses includes classical, pop, transcendental, and remixes.

While his paintings range from the figurative to the abstract to a combination thereof, the common thread is always his particular use of color.

The artist’s work is innovative and spontaneous, and never scripted. He likes to play with colors and lets them answer each other on the canvas. It is his approach that gets people involved in the painting as they lose themselves and escape into a story of color. Why is the moon black but the reflection yellow? Why is the sun green? Why are there two suns? Or why is there one sun but the reflection of seven? This is Romantic Irony.

James Purpura is a contemporary artist whose bright and bold paintings spark the imagination.