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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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