In styles ranging from geometric abstraction to still life, David Lehman’s watercolors describe the lingering impressions left by his readings. He transcribes a single line—drawn from poems—over which he paints thick, vibrant, dynamic images whose crudeness of shape seems to come from the urgency with which they were painted. The captions can be abstruse (“For time is an emulsion...”), foreboding (“Beyond the dunes, an ocean on fire,” “O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!”), and sardonic (“You’ll never be mentally sober”). Yet despite the differences in tone, when combined with Lehman’s artwork, they are all of them playfully enigmatic.

David Lehman has long been a member of the poetic milieu. A prolific poet himself, series editor of The Best American Poetry, NYU and New School professor, and critic, he is perhaps best known for his exercises in daily poetic composition. Lehman’s watercolors describe the conversations he seems to have with the poetic scene in which he is so immersed. Yet it would be erroneous to envision this interplay between two artistic mediums as a case of Kandinsky Lite. Kandinsky painted while listening to music (and possibly while suffering from synaesthesia)[1]; by its very nature, the written word prohibits such multi-tasking. The point is obvious enough, but worth emphasizing, nevertheless: David Lehman paints after the page is turned. What we find in his watercolors is not real-time inspiration, but an articulation of what remains for the reader; namely, the poem’s aura. Often enough, this entails capturing poetry’s mysteries while simultaneously deepening them.

This confluence of visual and literary enigma finds its most explicit examples in Lehman’s more abstract paintings. In vibrant blues, greens, reds, and oranges, “For time is an emulsion…”[2] (from John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”) describes rhombi, diamonds, triangles, and (for lack of a better term) blobs, suspended over a void, occasionally overlapping. Is this the molecular vision of a four-dimensional plane, with figures shifting in and out of one another? Or is it a playful meditation on Ashbery’s line, “to be small and clear and free”? Similarly, we find “You’ll never be mentally sober” (from Frank O’Hara’s “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday”). Here, we encounter two shapes: A transparent purple cylinder, and an orange hemisphere cut into wedges. As the two merge into one another, orange and yellow shoot out of the cylinder and glow at the sides of the hemisphere. To the left are yellow, blue, and purple letters, spelling, “SDML / DEL / JOE / OM/ A.” Is the cylinder a tube, mentioned by O’Hara in the line, “will your tubes ever break / into power?” Looking at both watercolors, one aspect remains clear: A sense of dynamism. As flecks of light spurt out and shapes collide, we find movement, emanations, a sense of the poem’s shifting and percolating in Lehman’s mind.

Intriguingly, this sense of mystery and open-endedness persists even as Lehman’s watercolors become relatively concrete. In “Beyond the dunes, an ocean on fire” (from James Schuyler’s “Dec. 28, 1974”), concentric circles of violet, olive green, and orange ascend from blue crags (the sea), which lie beyond ones of ecru (the dunes). Clearly, the scene is meant to evoke the final lines in Schuyler’s poem: “Yes, the sun moves off to the right, / and prepares to sink, setting, / beyond the dunes, an ocean on fire.” The sense of motion seems to point toward Lehman’s own continued conversation with the poem at hand. A similar paradox of vagueness and clarity is discerned in “O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!” (from Kenneth Koch). Over and among the multi-colored stripes rest a red potted flower and a red tube, foregrounded by a transparent decanter filled with green liquid. An otherwise placid still life is belied by the ominous verse beneath, forcing the audience to see something menacing contained within this decanter. Is this liquefied poetry, meant to metaphorically drown us in awe? Are we to be drowned in pleasure or pain? This vicissitude is expressed in the poem itself: “Hello, sea! good morning, sea! hello, clarity and ex- / citement, you great expanse of green-- / O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!” Yet paradoxically, in his watercolors, Lehman concretizes our vision of green liquid/“sea” while furthering the mystery of what the liquid is and of what drowning will mean.

Despite this occasional inclination toward the macabre, viewing David Lehman’s watercolors should be, above all, a fun experience. Fun because they seem to be the work of unedited impulse—and therefore a window into a vibrant thinker’s mind. And fun because the poetic line and painted image symbiotically feed off one another, both giving the clue to their mystery and expanding upon it. Ultimately, Lehman’s paintings speak to artistic collaboration: They are not merely images from an engaged reader, but from an aider and abettor to the game of poetry.

[1] For more information on Kandinsky’s possible case of synaesthesia, see Ossian Ward’s, “The Man Who Heard His Paintbox Hiss” (10 June, 2006), in Telegraph.co.uk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/06/10/bakandinsky10.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/06/10/ixtop.html; accessed 9 February, 2007.

[2] Throughout this essay, I will cite the watercolors by the captions Lehman gives them.