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, September 21, 2014

Mysterons

Rot und Grün - Red and Green 50 x 20 cm acryl/collage by Karin Goeppert





SUPERNATURAL

In order to stay in the good graces
of God you go to incredible lengths
of servitude and inconvenience
even transporting the Sunday school 
brats in that dilapidated station wagon 
your atheistic step father left you in his will  
as post-mortem revenge, as if knowing what   
sort of missionary use you’d put it to,
six little heathens practicing  
a version of human sacrifice in the back seat.
Now if this doesn’t get you a first class ticket
to heaven, there’s nothing left to do but pray  
while cicadas, inspired from On High, cackle in the wind.

If there was such a thing as ghosts they’d play poker on the roof,
smoke our stash, tap into our booze supply, grind
chips and dip into the carpet. One of them of course
would have to be addicted to snuff, leave empty coke cans
everywhere full of brown spit. He would be the one who
left the blue-grass red-neck records out of their sleeves
and all over the floor. Ghosts don’t haunt
                                                      so much as plague. And what’s
worse: not even God can kill them: they’re already dead.

Witches still exist. Today you can see them sashaying
atop perilous designer heels, not brooms, long clean hair shining
on the pallid beaches of Maui and Mykonos  
and not only do the waves gasp and froth, the wind breathe
in fits and starts. Trust me, bro, not only the waves or the wind.
But the only man who has their ear whispers
wicked things therein, the right spells, a promise of tickets
as he gently squeezes your nipples, darling,
to the coolest award shows in town( he looks a little
like Jack Nicholson, circa The Witches of Eastwick,
the same shit-eating grin, the dark glasses), which is all we’re interested in.
That, and how high our shoes can get, in every shade of
witchy pastel, every ice-creamy warlocky hue. The world looks on, spellbound.




Mysterons by Portishead

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Lost in the Woods

Treeline - pastel by Karin Goeppert




MÄRCHEN

Something’s seeping through the cell’s wall.
Perhaps a minor disturbance
an interior monologue
going on a little too loudly, a touch too long,   
something blooming in a syringe maybe
becoming an object of study, or an x-ray of your system
invaded by extraterrestrials.
And all you want, all you need
actually, and as soon as possible, is a drink—     
but it has to be in the right neighborhood—
a hut, say, on top of a 
mountain near Munich
where you order a tall cold beer
from a short warm woman, put your feet up on a chair 
with hearts carved into its hard wood—and sigh—
and wonder where your shoes went, and how the grass
got so green, and how good it feels on bare feet the grass  
lifting you even as you flatten the prickly green blades,
wonder if this young, somewhat overweight waitress
dressed in a Dirndl (a word with a vowel
missing in action, mutely crying for help in a dark German wood),
knows where you are going, and how you will get there.




Siegried's Funeral March by Richard Wagner
The Symphony Orchestra of the LISZT SCHOOL of Music Weimar
conducted by Marek Janowski

Sunday, September 7, 2014

5,672 miles from Home

3 Flowers 50 x 20 cm mixed media



THE KISS?

Climbing a hill on the outskirts of Stuttgart
in late April, actually we were sort of
swerving, being young, like atoms in that grand poem
by Lucretius, handbook for enlightened
atheists, forsythia blooming
yellow all around us, apple trees soft
with white blossom and a beer garden
hundred meters or so above us
whose gate we found closed and locked.
There was a sign that told us why, but I couldn’t
read it: being a foreigner makes you instantly illiterate.
A radical reduction of related intellectual skills as well.
After a while even a kind of insanity becomes the norm.
Flowers trembling in a sympathetic breeze anyway—
Keats would have loved it, would have had
 a 19thcentury Romantic conniption which might have
led to “Ode on Swabia”—but still no cold beer.
Five minutes later, it seemed, and it’s Carnival in Stuttgart.   
No shortage of anything cold. The parade outside Clara’s or
was it Sarah’s office window just above the Königsstrasse?
Early February, revelers wearing feathered masks
in the dark, blowing off pagan steam. Your friend was  
all alone and we talked. You two taking turns rushing off
to the WC. Spiked punch filling low capacity bladders.  
Then you were back, and she wasn’t, whispering moistly 
in my ear “Did you kiss her?” Strangers smooching in the shadows,
conducting instant love affairs in cobbled courtyards. In offices.   
Then you gave me a look that said—or at least I think it said—
”She will tell everyone you are boring.” I don’t think so,  
I answered in my thoughts—not if SHE kissed me. 
 



R.E.M. - Half a World Away