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, October 26, 2014

States of Mind

Herbstbusch - Autumn Bush 50 x 60 cm Acryl/Oilsticks/Oilpastel





AIRBORNE

We’re not even airborne yet
and they offer us a sedative—a mix
of white wine and carbonated water.
Eighty-three passengers are pretending 
they don’t have to burp,
whispering excuse me every 20 seconds
through tightly clenched fists. Please
raise that plastic shutter, thank you, and while you’re
at it could you give me a massage? Absolutely nothing
would agree with me more right now 
than a strong shot of uncomplicated pleasure
and as fast as possible. Such was Thailand.
On the beach. A roofless palm-thatched hut.
Slicked with coconut oil and pulled up to
heaven by the shaft of life. Amen. And now?
There’s a lump in my throat, and it’s difficult to swallow
air, saliva, anything. Just sit back and feel free, a voice advises, 
to feel the snake of feeling that coils around your neck
till you can’t breathe anymore, till you can’t even tell
you’re not breathing anymore, till some exhausted intern
in an understaffed urban emergency room
pronounces me dead, and who, when he turns his
slump-shouldered back, I give the slip
and live to die another day. Numbers call us to air.
Distractions: behind every smile—plots, puzzles,
a tiny nest of deceit. Believe nothing. The girl who
spills her wine spritzer in your lap? She smiles; but instead
of paranoia—a vicious plot to get you wet, or mere accident?—
in your heart
there wells up a great wave of peace,
plenitude and delusion. Believe everything. Shit, why not?
And we’re not even airborne yet. 




One - Aimee Mann

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Misty Mountain

Hagebutte II - Dog Rose (Rose Hip) II - 39 x 39 cm





IN BAYERISCHZELL

There’s something archaic
about this, not old fashioned,

cold foggy air, mist, always
moving, wearing a spicy

tannenbaum fragrance, mixed with pine
it’s not like shopping or office work

and if I ever see another fucking computer
and something else, undefinable, a twinge

at the back of the mind, or down lower
where the hypothalamus talks lizard

to an uppity but all too impressionable
cerebral cortex, you’d think, and this, as we

are hiking the rim of valley and mountain’s
foothill, the long lonely way down, my big toes hurt

and even before we can discuss, label, file them  
certain feelings flare up and then die out, hardly felt at all

and sometimes we spot through the shredded clouds
the wood-balconied inn in whose antlered hall
I will eat Zwiebelrostbraten and fried potatoes
and drink at least two glasses of beer, and Karin

will dine on fish and potato salad, the light
of our candle flaring out while I observe a

woman absently staring back at her husband’s
absent stare, the long

lonely way down, a waitress bending her rosy shoulders,
clean blond head and plump cleavage

forward, like a serving girl
in a genre painting, to re-light our candle. 




4 Non Blondes - Misty Mountain Hop


Sunday, October 12, 2014

Time

Hagebutte - Dog Rose 39 x 39 cm




CHANGES

Let’s go to the movies
and be someone else for a change.
Self is a burden, we are restless,
we are human, we are restless.
Brad and Angelina let’s be them for a while
or a good not merely good looking Gregory Peck
in To Kill A Mockingbird, a man who does his utmost
and says Yes Sir in such an emphatic fashion
that he must be ironic (right?) but we know that
irony isn’t what he’s about he’s about Justice
is celluloid proof that liberalism ennobles
and I would love to be Warren Beatty in Shampoo
he who manages to have sex with an especially obtuse Republican
businessman’s wife, his mistress and his daughter
—talk about hat trick, talk about Triple Crown—
who’s played by Carrie Fisher, masterpiece of a
precocious high school senior in blue jean cut-offs
or classic tennis whites I don’t remember exactly
who consumes contraceptives and aces physics French
chemistry and is bound for Stanford where she’ll go to bed with
only those professors who can actually teach her something
new which is a mix of back story and conjecture and wishful thinking
and has nothing to do with the movie I would like to be in
and then there’s the The Big Lebowski of course the
“Dude” not brilliant by a long-shot this slacker’s slacker
enthusiastically addicted to bowling and White Russians
and yet he’s almost a new category of human being
complete and perfected in his not entirely indispensable
uniqueness & I’d like to be Michael Corleone
when he finds his vocation & dons the mask
of cold judgment as one of his henchmen leans
forward & whispers in Al Pacino’s (Michael Corleone’s) ear that
all of his rivals have been rubbed out, which is good, they’re a nasty lot
& Pacino looking impassive and utterly Sicilian like fate
itself walking out of an alley-way in Palermo flipping a coin
a young man, probably in his late 20’s, and that’s the contrast
that makes it stick, relative youth crossing over to the Dark Side
which is not a good place to be but a place we like to visit
sometimes because we are restless and we are human, we are restless.




To Kill a Mockingbird
Opening Credits - composer Elmer Bernstein