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With Water on Water, the last of three publications, Dutch artist Joost de Jonge brings his decade-long project, “Painted Poetry & Painterly Poetics – an ekphrastic notion,” to a thunderous conclusion. The weighty volume, brimming with writing from around the globe and rich in the work of de Jonge himself, investigates and celebrates that “ekphrastic notion” by surveying possibilities for cross-disciplinary influence and address. So much work in multi- and intermedia, from the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk to the concrete poetry, graphic notation, and performance art of the mid- and late-20 th century, now seems to subsume into the instant and ongoing spectacle of the digital world. But ekphrasis proposes parallels, not combinations, and reactions among autonomous creative minds rather than collaborations between them. Ekphrasis presumes a mirroring rather than a fusing of artwork, a transposition of form, tone, and meaning from static to kinetic condition, for instance, or from verbal to somatic. Music is seen; poetry is colored – not on a sensate level, as in synesthesia, but on a discursive level. Synesthesia is automatic reaction. Ekphrasis is conscious reaction. Water on Water collects myriad conscious reactions, to de Jonge’s paintings and drawings, to the work of others (such as pioneering video artist Ira Schneider), and to the notion of ekphrasis itself. Commentators – among them such renowned writers as Joy Harjo, Mary Ann Caws, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, and Richard Candida Smith – examine as well as exemplify the concept and its ramifications. The beautifully produced tome is a Festschrift in reverse: instead of honoring an individual, this gathering of art and observation is directed by an individual to honor an idea.

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