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Having
grown up and lived
with
Kandinsky’s
work for most of my
life, most of
what’s around
me tends to refer me
to him in one way or
another. Some phrase
I hear resonates
with a phrase in
something he wrote,
a face takes me to
his early interest
in shamanism, from a
squiggle emerges a
wiggly line in one
of his paintings,
I’m convinced
that such and such
snippet of music
would be perfect for
one of his stage
pieces.
Over the years,
I’ve gathered
paintings around me,
come by in a variety
of informal and
formal ways. Two
favorites are from
an abandoned wartime
shelter and a
monsoon mud puddle
in Korea; a few
others, I paid off
in increments for a
few years. Junk
sales, auctions;
paintings found
blowing in the road
and leaning against
a lamppost;
well-known
galleries,
collectors who left
me a collectible,
and so on and on.
All sources of
paintings I cherish
and miss when
I’m away.
Quite a number of
the paintings I have
were given to me by
the artists
themselves. Three of
those works in
particular give me
the peculiar
experience of
hearing a poem of
Kandinsky’s
coming from it. Said
another way, from
certain artworks, I
can’t separate
what I see from the
sound of a Kandinsky
poem I know. I got
to know the artists
Gerstein and Wiley
(see below) through
our shared devotion
to Kandinsky, but
they probably
didn’t know
the poems and we
never talked about
them; the
relatedness of their
paintings to the
Kandinsky poems is
in me. Well, see if
you can tell what I
mean:
“Lagoon,” by Marie Guelld [aka Wesolowski]
“Parting the Curtain,” by Philip Gerstein
[see Scene4 archives for more of his paintings]
“Supplicant,” by David Wiley
[see Scene4 archives for his paintings and poems]
Since I “hear” his poems in the paintings, it’s interesting to me
that Kandinsky’s best-known poems are in a collection he called
“Sounds.” I also wonder if it’s only by chance that I gravitate to
painters in whose work lies the voice of a poem by another artist.
Oakland, California, 2026
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