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 Wagne...