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.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas

Wir wünschen Euch ein schönes, geruhsames Weihnachtsfest und einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr!
Danke, dass Ihr unserem kleinen blog die Treue gehalten habt.
Kens Gedicht "Gone" ist für all diejenigen, die auch dieses Jahr jemanden verloren haben.

Mit den besten Grüßen
Karin und Ken


We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Ken's poem "Gone" is for everyone who has lost someone this year.
Thank you for following our little blog.

Best wishes,
Karin and Ken


Daphne 38,5 x 28,5 cm Pastell/pastel





GONE
                               
How different are we? I mean from each other.
I know if I sit down next to you I will
think of something to say. Not the

weather, perhaps, so much as Climate—
heavy with electrical storms and tsunamis
and other bad omens—will be our theme.

When did I learn to read the map of your moods? Any time now  
I’ll be listening for that excited breathing that leads up to
an elaborate statement about life on earth. Such as

your notion that if all human error—Right Wing wackiness, for example,
or a double-header on some stinking sweat-pot of a summer day in NYC,
speculation of any sort about mind-body, or the perverse

maneuvers of schizoid sub-atomic particles, etc.—were eliminated
we’d lose something of our humanity, which might not be
too bad. Or very boring. Or just not possible.

Your whims were little eruptions, not always pleasant
but strangely sustaining. Or maybe I’m making all of this up.
At the end, which always seems so abrupt, there are only

a handful of particles left behind. Each in the singular.
The last word. The harsh whisper. The plea that can only be ignored.
The sight of your back moving away like a sail, like this poem. Gone.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Happy Hour



 
untitled 40 x 30 cm Aquarell/Acryl/Dispersionsfarbe/Kohle



NEVERTHELESS

Looking for a little inspiration
in asphalt melting August,
the more unlikely the better, we attended
happy hour at the Sheraton Palace, beer a buck fifty  
a pop and free chicken wings in barbecue sauce. Debs and their
penguin suited dates; a few politicians for rent. Holt asking, “So,
what are your dreams?” Karin wanting to be a writer. Brad wanting
to be smart, smarter, smartest. “Albigensians or Alsatians. Jesus, Brad,
who cares?” I complained, not wanting to want anything, but lazy
that season, thus unable to do the hard work of being nothing. Soon
I was rapt with my own vision of make believe. Imagination  
an easy, graceful girl till she meets the critic who lives upstairs,   
then the fighting never stops; broken promises; threats of abandonment, etc.  
What about that first draft of a novel suicidally consigned to flames
in a rusty barrel, vacant lot, Providence, Rhode Island, pleasantly surprised
homeless people huddling up for some free heat? Or Byron
burning Shelly’s corpse on an Italian beach? Not exactly  
the same thing but what about that? Do you have an opinion, a theory?
Not in the mood to answer questions, afflicted with the munchies     
we stopped for breakfast at a diner on the outskirts. We were 
implausibly young. I can’t remember our faces. Nevertheless, nevertheless.




Sunday, December 13, 2015

Babe

Weststrand - Westbeach 50 x 70 cm acryl on cotton canvas by Karin Goeppert



YOURS TRULY…ME

& then she left you.
The drift of formal decline,
structural flaws, cumulative neglect,
whatever.
You had been enjoying a modicum of fame
& no matter how undeserved, you savored it.
Always away on lecture tours, addressing
enthusiastic corporate execs, fund managers, even sending
into conniption fits of self-satisfied glee
                                                  the bristling cohorts of private equity.
You were taking self-improvement to unheard of lows.
I just didn’t want you to come home
while I was tying my shoe laces, that’s all, Sylvie—lovely,
lovely, and a wonderful cook—having absorbed most of my tension,
making coffee now. By the way, can you pay me back that
hundred bucks you still owe me & return my putting iron, a number
three, surely gone to rust by now in a damp corner of your garage?
Thanks for everything. Yours truly…me.  




Sunday, November 29, 2015

Kim Kardashian's Ass




 
Ebbe (Diptychon) - Low Tide (Diptych) 90 x 30 cm acrylic/spray paint/ink on canvas

KIM KARDASHIAN’S ASS

A thief put a knife
to my throat and said
give me everything you got.
I emptied my pockets and out fell a volume of Shakespeare.
Then some essays by Schopenhauer.
He stabbed me, I think, not so much
for my taste in reading matter
as for the all too voluminous proof
that I read at all. Read too much.
Read as if in defiance of the world, its lousy zero-sum options.
The wound wasn’t as deep as the Grand Canyon
nor as broad as Kim Kardashian’s ass
but look for me tomorrow and you will find
this promiscuous reader and epicurean
anarchist, and all that that entails,
in a world of pain.
To say how much we know
is to admit nothing
but we do know someone’s coming for us  
in the Swedish dark coming fast
and nobody seems to know when
and we never know why, just as we never know
why good fish tastes like chicken, but there you are
or why I am standing on a sidewalk
in what appears to be Dallas, Texas
at four in the morning a knife sticking out of me. But here I am.



Sunday, November 22, 2015

La Mer

Maritim - Maritime 80 x 80 cm acryl/oilpastel/spraypaint on canvas by Karin Goeppert



SOMETIMES LESSER, SOMETIMES BETTER

There you are being pushed
   along the coastal path
by an eighty-mile an hour wind,
mouth hurting from smiling so hard.
Your spirit, escaping, races around
   like a balloon cut loose
at a child’s birthday party
but remains in your body because
frankly it has nowhere else to go.
On the umbrella pines, which are
leaning away like boxers on the ropes
who want to fight back but cannot,
   is light
the color of good English marmalade.  
The wind is
spitting wads of foam all over
   a disappearing beach. Meanwhile
Just three miles away in an atavistically
   smoky room,
a woman whose smile, without light,
has declared her absence, returns briefly
to show amusement  
   as your sometimes lesser, sometimes better self
shifts groaningly its fat ass from one side
   of a barstool to the other.



Sunday, November 8, 2015

Divine Intervention


Morning Walk, Uffing 50 x 70 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert




DIVINE INTERVENTION

If children laugh at you, and dogs bark at your hair,
don’t worry about it: they love you. Who wouldn’t?
And the world is not a shopping mall. It is a garden,
a garden within gardens. Prowling beneath the fronds
are beautiful animals, and we love them hard. And
there are moments. There are still some moments.
Someone I know, a poet of sorts, once told me
he went for a run on the island of Samos.  Up through the olive trees.
Fresh Aegean morning, just before the heat drops
its full weight on your head; the quiet unruffled sea giving off
a beaten golden sheen. Not even vaguely devout, he nevertheless
raises his hands and praises Zeus. Offers thanks for the literally
awesome light and its revelation of gnarled limbs, the writhing trunks
and a Swedish or Danish girl in shorts and t-shirt picking her way
down the path smiling at me as if after a night of love. And for
the goofy little gesture of lifting my palms to the sky I thank you as well.
Would be greedy to ask for more.  Not that that’s ever stopped me.