You see the painter calculating and hesitating, for all the bravura application of material to the canvas. The lines, the representational parts in what would otherwise be some sort of abstract expressionism, do not show the loosness and flow one senses in more confident artists, like Helen Frankenthaler. Van Vliet's abstract elements tend to be short, choppy, tight. Colors are muddled, as if arbitrarily picked and applied. There's little sense of the overall harmony of elements, of things working together for a totality.
Separate elements seem to be at odds with each other in the same space.
You've got rather mundane representational portraits of people against a backdrop of muddy colors too lavishly applied. He was a very ego-centric man, for all the elation in his poems. I wonder if Van Vliet doesn't suffer from that a bit as well. Be that as it may, the music is there. And I love it.