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.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Primary Colors

Island Hopping 27 x 19 cm









TO A WAITRESS IN A GREEK RESTAURANT

I really like your plastic bra straps.
They do something, um, just right
for your  shoulders. Is that your old man
out there, smashing an octopus, our dinner, perhaps, against a rock?
Do you like octopus?  Stupid question, of course you do. I’ll bet
your favorite movie scene is the one in which Zorba
leaps up, show-off that he is, and starts dancing
a mighty “Yes!!!” to life. Charming, and it doesn’t seem to
matter to most viewers that a Greek everyman
is played by a Mexican actor with an Irish name,
but the point is, what I really don’t want to
say but should, actually the point is, dear
girl — you can’t be older than 19 or 20,
right?—what about schedule delays,
corruption of every shape and configuration,
what about hot, mosquito-crazed 
nights in a cheap Piraeus hotel  
room with its noisy, ineffectual 
attempt at air conditioning?
An occasional slap dash of Nordic structure just might, um,
bring a degree of order(yawn, scratch)to this white-washed, creamy, garlicky
Orthodox life-style we find ourselves in the midst of,
the retsina and fried squid, the casual disregard for traffic laws,
the way a cruel sunset once stained
the white domes of Ios
a delicate, girlish pink
further enhanced by the special effects of substance abuse
and everything so cheap(at least
in 1984 when this poem, as it were, takes place)—
which leads me to the obvious conclusion that,
given a choice, I’d opt for the oral compulsive 
over the anal retentive anytime:
desire lives the anarchy of its own laws.
I’ve studied this issue. The hand that smashed
octopus against rock is now delivering
our glasses of on-the-house ouzo, and here’s my wife
just come back from the Lady’s
her face with “you bastard” written all over it,
and so I wish you a good night,
and a good life, whatever your name is, everything will be fine.
This is the future speaking. Everything will be. 





Zorba the Greek
from the movie by  Mihalis Kakogiannis
based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis
with Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates and Irene Papas

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Bella Italia




Upper Town Fiesole 30 x 20 cm





THE TREES OF LUCCA

Some of his friends
called D.H. Lawrence “Lorenzo,”
I suppose because of his love for Italy. He had
utopian fantasies about the Etruscans
who, judging from their tomb paintings,
seemed to think the afterlife was an elegant orgy.
He enjoyed long walks in the countryside, and after
didn’t mind getting down on his knees and scrubbing floors.


It would be interesting to see how Don Lorenzo would react
to a pierced, tattooed, wired-for-sound urban
proletarian riding the subway some Manhattan morning,
abundantly, inspiringly female
on her way to Columbia or the New School
for a seminar on English Modernist Novelists.

How would she react to him?
No doubt she’d give him crap about his sexism,
his laughable phallic imagery, that he sometimes punched
his German wife, Frieda, and about his endless tourism
and negative views on masturbation
which is, as everyone knows, like, a very cool activity.

The whole time that she’s putting
not only his work but his existence into question,
she’s sucking some coffee shop product 
from a cup/mug/baby bottle made out 
of a substance he’s never seen before
since it hadn’t been invented yet in the 1920’s. The fact that she
calls him “dude,” and advises that he “chill,” also is perplexing.

It might be humane at this point to send him back to Tuscany,
buy him a caffè “corretto” (espresso with a splash of grappa), and draw
his attention to the strange fact that actual trees do grow out of the towers and walls of Lucca.






O Soave Fanciulla from La Boheme


 Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Saturday in the Park

For those who love the leafy moments in life


Dombühl 22 x 29,5 cm - 8,7 x 11.6''

 




YOU CAN’T DO THAT TO ME

says the man on a bench 
pretty much out of nowhere.
His voice is loud but sounds hog-tied.
The coppery beeches are joined
in their upper limbs leaf
to leaf and there are white chairs
on the hedged in lawns
where nearly naked sun bathers
are smoking hash and drinking beer;
what we need is an updated Renoir
to capture in drunken brush-strokes, in stoned
impasto, their pungent, carnal pleasures.
You can’t do that to me? What kind of statement is that?
Wittgenstein would have certainly
refused to consider its logic.
On the other hand, you might say,
Wittgenstein had his own problems,
couldn’t figure out if he wanted to be
a philosopher or a construction worker.
Still, the grass is thick and warm
and there’s an odor of barbecued meat
drifting past the lilacs and honeysuckle
and a sweat worm, yes, a worm comprised
of sweat, is crawling down my rib
cage and an otherwise anonymous girl 
is working with lascivious ingenuity
on a long cylindrical popsicle
like an old pro in the porn trade.
Life could be worse. Life could
be a snow storm on a train platform.
An assessment center at a Major Corporation.
You can’t do that to me? Tell that to the Marine Corps
drill instructor yelling in your ear.
Listen to that from the sucking
pig being barbecued right now by a soccer club 
already three sheets to the wind, working on their fourth.
You can’t do that to me, squeals the pig.
Watch me, says the soccer player.
One little piggy goes to the market,
and one perverse little piggy eats pork chops(alas, we know the type),
and one last little piggy 
will not run all the way home ever again.

 



Chicago - Saturday in the Park