In this blog we will share with you our vision of beauty, balance, harmony.

As Mark Leach writes in his book Raw Colour with Pastels: “Sound is all around us, and it is musicians who refine that sound into something of beauty. As a painter, I have always felt that my purpose is to craft colour in a similar way, to see through the confusion and seek harmony and beauty.”

And we add: Words, fragments of sentences, spoken noise is all around us, and Ken arranges words in such a way as to capture beauty in the accidental, the ambient soundtrack of life.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Altered States

Nach dem Regen - After the Rain 24 x 20 cm





SINFONIA

Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia”
could be listened to as a Da-Da tone poem,
a bewildering, inspired, irreducible
Modernist confection
or as a witty, deeply
sophisticated sub-species of schizophrenia
dictated to the composer by the spirit of madness.
How sane am I today?—the music seems
to be asking you—How sane is anybody…any day?
Collateral 
damage from the past washes up     
and it’s Oh Christ, what do we do now?
A new colleague approaches you, says  ”Look, I’m growing my beard,
feels great, going to the gym twice a week, feels great, my name’s
Chris, by the way.” He’s clean-shaven with bits of TP stuck
to his razor cuts. So, like, where’s the beard, dude? Is just one of
several questions you would like to ask him if you weren’t   
backing out the door as if under attack. You are wandering
through the souks of North Africa in the midst of a
scratch n’ sniff system of hash, incense, musky perfumes, wood smoke.
People are smiling, joking, talking fast as they walk backwards,
talking backwards as they walk fast, taking time to caress
a camel hair doo-dad, shop for magic spells, greet a cobra. It’s so pre-rational!
In just a week you’ll be discussing the Value Added Tax with a client  
or doing the crossword, impatient, irritated. And yet your life has changed.
Maybe you will grow a beard. Cast a spell on your secretary. Start a rug collection.




L. Berio - Sinfonia
Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam




Sunday, December 22, 2013

Fröhliche Weihnachten - Merry Christmas

Frohe Weihnachten - Merry Christmas

We want to thank you for your interest and wish you a very Merry Christmas and a creative and healthy New Year.

Wir danken für Euer Interesse und wünschen Euch ein frohes Weihnachtsfest und ein kreatives und gesundes Neues Jahr.




ARIZONA

You want heat? I’ll give you Phoenix
the year JFK was shot, a couple of ladies
sitting around the pool scorched
a leathery plum-tinged brown verging on puce
and it’s not even eleven in the morning
some local kid frying an egg on the burning
concrete at pool side, saying Hey look
at me and everyone yawning, oh like I’m really impressed, it
being an old trick usually reserved for relatives from Minnesota
or North Dakota pale soft creatures in bathing caps cowering
beneath the crushing weight of our solar existence
the lawns irrigated so you could splash people who
walked by on the side-walk then run away ankle-deep
in coolish water, that was the summer, 115 degrees every freaking day,
that mom farmed us out to a couple of bachelors who shared
the most cluttered apartment in the history of Western Civ.
and that my brother and I cleaned for fifty cents an hour.
Mom said they were CIA agents. They wandered around in a daze
drinking strong-smelling fruit juice early in the day, as I imagine  
Frank O’ Hara once did, joking bitterly with each other, promising
a dollar bonus if we didn’t break a single one of their sticky glasses. 




Sunday, December 8, 2013

Margie walking to Deya

Auf dem Weg nach Deya - On the way to Deya 38,5 x 28,5 cm





MARGIE

Yes, Margie, Roanoke is in Virginia, and a wall of blue mountains
forms a backdrop in the rain and there’s an airport too
mainly for transit flights between G.I. towns
like Fayetteville and Columbus and a few other camouflaged enclaves
and thence to somewhat better known destinations. Once when
passing through on my way to I don’t know where and
   just enough of a “cherry” to be wearing
the uniform when on leave or TDY, I was cornered by a short, young woman
in flowing hippie drag who tried to sell me a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita
or some kindred scripture—I wasn’t up on Hindu mythology—and I 
was ready to blow her off when she told me I looked handsome in uniform—  
   what could I do but give her
a couple of bucks, and thus end up incongruously with a book from whose 
cover a multi-limbed deity with blue skin smiled out at the material world? 
When she moved almost dancingly away I noticed 
   a fairly well-disguised limp. She might have been
wearing bells around her ankles. It’s even possible I heard
their tinkling, vaguely mystical music, not at all like that of an ice-cream truck,   
two or three blocks away, on a summer afternoon, and you
   skip-skipping into the house for money. It was your club foot that made you
skip-skip instead of run-run. And the girl’s limp made me remember that foot, Marge,
                             and how you treated it
the way a loving mother treats her afflicted child, with affection and subdued pain.
Not at all how Josef Goebbels felt about his club foot, or Oedipus about his,
as they swung their burdens into the darker shades
                                                             of history and myth, and became them. 





Arvo Pärt - Collage sur Bach

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Hotter than Hell


When we chose the music for  this Greek blog post we were again reminded of how strange and nice it is that we have a very similar music taste even though we grew up so far apart from each other - two worlds basically. AND we both love the Mediterranean! So here goes: Some Greek music for you.


So far up 38,5 x 28,5 cm


PELOPONNESIAN HEAT

There’s a whisper in the pine woods. Very pretty.
Makes you want to write poems. Then it sounds
like girls in flip-flops and kitchen clogs
on the steps of The Quaintest Taverna
You Ever Saw. Your quill begins to molt. Soon, sprawled
in the hot dust, bloated like some sexual insect,
you can’t even walk anymore. Girls tumble by, fanning the world
with their thin cotton dresses and shadow-casting
eye lashes. The thick blossoms of oleander bushes
smell like scorched milk and on the rocks below the cliffs
where an odor of burning jasmine lingers the women too
are burning in the sun. Seen from the old town walls
the hills on the other side of the gulf, violet
and smoky, are on fire as you crawl off into the shade, seeking relief—
an old man perched on a donkey smiles at you, lips parched, eyes
damp with pity, and says, “The heat, it is like Africa.” 




Aphrodite's Child - The Four Horsemen

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Turquoise Contemplation

Ich hatte mal ne türkise Vase - Once I had a turquoise vase 38 x 28 cm

Many years ago - more than 30 for sure - I visited the relatives of my friend Alan and his mother had a red flower infront of a turquoise painting. I never forgot that color combination. I loved it.

So, Alan, this is to you!



CONTEMPLATION

                                    If you look long enough into the abyss
                                    the abyss just might look back.
                                                                  Friedrich Nietzsche                                              

On a good day when I
look at a work of art
I experience a state of mind
I call ecstatic contemplation.
I am lifted up to a pleasant mountain
pavilion fluffed with scented cushions
and here’s a water pipe, thank you so much, loaded 
with a cutting-edge substance, and the tip
of this pipe, connected to my mouth, 
is held in place there by a half-naked girl
whose twin sister is down at the other end
giving me, shall we say, a lovely foot massage?
But no, I don’t think that’s what art does;
I think that’s what middle-age does.
Otherwise multitudes of robust
consumers upon whom our economic  
health depends would abandon shopping malls
and theme parks and KFCs and we would have
to wait hours to get into the Dallas-Ft. Worth
Museum of Fine Arts on a Monday evening,
the Cowboys playing the 49ers at home to empty seats.
We would have to book the Prado, the Uffizi
years in advance. Ecstatic contemplation
is an out of body experience, and
there’s a hidden risk to self-esteem.
It’s not meant to be easy. First,
you stand back and wait for a Russian aesthete
to cell phone photograph his hot-panted
friend teetering on her spike-heeled tight-
rope athwart the “Primavera,” say, or a
little garden scene by Leonardo as if it
were a new Jag or Porsche. Then, after
they depart, you find yourself, if all goes well,
cut off, out of the world, lost in a dream
of perfect skin—those Italian masters were
notorious voluptuaries, and even Mary, virgin mother  
of God, looks hot—shimmering silks and fabrics    
in intricate golden lit folds and creases. If you stand   
there long enough the picture waking from its
own dream will notice it’s being noticed
and start to contemplate you; vaguely androgynous   
angels with rainbow wings will take you in   
if none too ecstatically, and it’s like that line
in the Rilke poem: You Must Change Your
Life the Archaic Torso says to the Great Poet, i.e., thou art
a dud compared to me, a slob, and my maker wouldn’t waste
five minutes of his valuable time rendering you—
or, as a certain king once put it, “it’s now or 
never,” so there’s no time to waste.





Omar Faruk Tekbilek - Ayasofya