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, 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

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