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, January 26, 2014

Foreign Intrigue

Dancing the Night Away 40 x 30 cm





TRIPPING

The edge of a periphery, the blind old
sky scrawled upon by cook fires—smells good, looks weird.
But all I have to do is close my eyes half-way and  
   do the radio talk fandango, Rush at rush hour,
for it to remind me of Oklahoma City
                         on a sultry afternoon.
Blueprint for disaster? We just might have one
or two left over from the last one. Let me check. Yep,
a career of some sort does seem to beckon
through the wood smoke: glitter of poplars,
opium deserts, feckless self-created experts
in a cluster-fuck of mutual confusion, collusion—you’ll fit right in.

Here’s what happened. Special Ops
                          transmitted grid coordinates, and a rare variety   
   of shit hit the fan. It took
years to clean up and a treatise or two (“think tanks”), but now
                                    the flanks of smoking camels
(ever addictive) loom on a mountain ridge the color of
a suburban sofa, i.e., beige, and we like it here, could
be, not on, but BE the cutting edge of something interesting
if only we can stick it out. So, fill the pipe, my love,
my dark-eyed friend, remind music she’s heiress to
                        the wind, and that the river of life in these parts  
burns with a million fevers no tablet can cure. 




Led Zeppelin - Kashmir

Sunday, January 19, 2014

La Dolce Vita

Blaue Briese - Blue Breeze 28,5 x 38,5 cm






THE SWEET LIFE

Being in Italy is a sensuous project
requiring intelligence and good taste.
Failing those qualities, money, or at
least a facsimile thereof, helps a lot.
In these parts appetite is a feeling,
a deep emotion fraught with musical content. 
Thus lunch today is a concerto for rose-tinted
thinly sliced veal in a shallow pool of olive oil
accented with anarchic squirts of lemon. But first
an overture because after two glasses of vino rosso
della casa lunch has become operatic: ravioli delicately
packed with minced whatever, cooked in butter,
draped with fragile flakes of sage. Dolce and coffee 
follow. A nearly depleted credit card
struggles to pay for all of this.
Not a drop of free grappa, however, despite   
a shitload of bravos and bravas dispensed
by two sincerely satisfied customers. Nonetheless,
we lurch happily into sunlight, the heroic streets
belonging to us. But this a lie. My “roots” are on
the other side of water, digging ever deeper in sub-soil
I don’t know anymore, slippery, metamorphic,
vaguely fraudulent. Memory seems like another
word for self-deception. Or as Wyndam Lewis more
or less put it: “Roots? What are we, bushes and
trees…or men?” On the other hand, that asshole
of a genius did praise Hitler. Still, I don’t feel like 
a vegetable or fruit, or even a tall noble
redwood on some wind-warped bluff
lording over the Pacific. I am a
sated animal who laughably assumes 
he’s sui generis, roughly, pulling his load 
of fear and guilt and perfunctory self-loathing
but on his way to admire how Andrea Del Sarto
painted hands, and Raphael, the sweetness of mother and child.    





Corelli - Concerto grosso opus 6 No. 8
Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Invitation

Das Licht auf der anderen Seite - The Light on the other Side 52 x 36 cm




INVITATION

I used to like people, would dream about them…mindlessly…magnificent
animals is what Nietzsche called us, and I even acquired a few of my own, kept them
around the house till, half-past dead with boredom, I had just enough strength
   left to throw them out. Like most empires at a certain stage
of their decline, I dream mainly of food, small pleasures, tiny divertimenti.

And alcohol. And the wild weed I cultivate amid corn and cucumbers. But now that
you’ve wandered in…my new friend!...let’s hang out together beneath the trellis
and eat olives and feta cheese in a cucumber salad and drink retsina and smoke from
the pipe of wisdom. Maybe I’ll give you that massage I promised in a moment
of mindless lust. Let’s talk of old times we’ve never shared
because the best parties are sometimes those that have no reason to exist…like some
poems…then I’ll switch on the boogie box…can’t imagine never dancing again. You? 




Let's Dance - David Bowie


Sunday, January 5, 2014

Winter

Im Baum - In the Tree 36 x 52 cm






WINTER TO THE CORE

Located in the deeps of cold fog and snow drifts  
is a museum in which a sun burned meadow by Monet   
hangs in a heat haze of July or August, young ladies   
in long gloves underneath parasols, and
across the room is a Renoir girl—
hands red, 
roughened by work—
the liquid green light of oak and chestnut leaves
surrounding but not touching her as she lingers on a porch,
the look of resignation on her face so consummate….
But who can get there? The wind comes clawing 
icily out of Russia, as far away as the Steppes, an awful hint on its breath
of the Red Army shitfaced on bathtub vodka
freezing the will, leaving it ravished and half consumed 
half way to the bus stop. All that’s left as the snow and ice swirl
by is the birthday call to a close friend who could just kill you for “reminding” her.




Winter - Vivaldi
performed by Julia Fischer