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, April 26, 2015

Masquerade






Purple Eclipse 60 x 50 cm - acryl/oil pastel on canvas board c/o Karin Goeppert



POSTCARD

How much vodka do I need
the quantity ought to be just enough   
to submerge a distracting past    
picked and pawed through for fifty-five minutes
a week which is why you moved to Brussels
adding to all that bureaucratic bloat
the empty elegant little life
you have always wanted to live
which is not as bad as it sounds if you are
empty and elegant to begin with
which is not as bad as it sounds if you really  
truly adore the Flemish language, darling, and
there’s this awesome beach on Lesbos where the wind
comes up from behind you and the water is still and glassy
as the eye of a Buddha slash maître d’ just before it winks
love slipping away quietly on a fishing boat at dusk. 




Sunday, April 19, 2015

RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES




 
Ein fiebriger Moment - A feverish Moment 50 x 70 cm c/o Karin Goeppert



RECOLLECTIONS AND OTHER LIES

It ain’t fine but it does have a certain
rustic poise, the wine, a voluptuous
body and there are the cherry tomatoes,
goat cheese, sardines in oil, the Mediterranean
religion, pleasure in a word,
yes and again yes, date palms like hula skirts
fired up in the hot sun, and as a bonus we’re making love
in our six-star boudoir. Pure fantasy, I’m afraid, a lie.
What I’d really like to recollect, if it were possible—
because to re-collect properly you must first have “collected” something—

is the cloistered white-washed silence
of hundreds of miniscule churches—
one tiny space each, stuffed with dust-furred icons—and
more or less surrounded by cooing dove-cotes
on Myconos and Tinos
neither of which we can afford to visit, and never will

ditto Lesbos
where the head of Orpheus is still said
to chatter away on the beach at Molyvos
urging hungry, somewhat surprised tourists
to drop in at Uncle Kosta’s tavern, just behind the port,
   for fish with very special sauce.  
You told me a few years ago that only the
irreducible mattered, the delectably
inaccessible, is how you put it, an awkward phrase
but pretty impressive for a junior college drop-out. I was hooked.
I recall

we were eating gyros and pita bread in the city and
I asked you to abandon your husband and child
and “run away” with me—and how
you couldn’t stop laughing at the “very thought.”
I’ll never forget that.
And your legs. And your bottom 
as you walked over to feed the juke box, how
it seemed, beneath the polka dots, to have a rubbery life all its own.
 And, yes, the mole you might have had right between your eyes—
or was that some other dream?



Sunday, April 12, 2015

Stoned Again


 
Fast da! - Almost there! 38,5 x 28,5 cm c/o Karin Goeppert


THE REAL LIFE

is a pill that if ingested will illuminate every leaf on every tree
   in the Garden of Abshard,
famed for its orchards, poets, and the restorative powers of its water.   
Or: a train station in provincial Austria, which may be redundant,
so: a train station in Austria.
The shabby genteel restaurant within.
Sweaty citizens gorging on blood pudding  
and ambiguous potato dumplings floating in porcelain bowls of clear broth.
After which schnapps is called for by a man dressed in Lederhosen
while in the bathroom the ghost of Thomas Bernhard pukes into a sink.
“The hairy skin of only the plumpest raspberries is used to make our schnapps.”

Did you know that Shakespeare invented the word “pewk?”
And when was the last time you heard the designation “shabby genteel”
applied to something or someone?
James Joyce?
The back streets of Charleston, S.C.?
My grandmother’s living room?

What if “the real life” doesn’t mean anything anymore either?
Or maybe the really real, at this moment in time anyway,
                                                    is a walk to the store. Along the way  
                                 a creek, and a pot-holed gravel path
                   down which a languid girl in a straw hat, smoking a jazz cigarette,  
saunters by, singing a song none of us will ever hear again.


 Some cool music after read more!


Monday, April 6, 2015

Kind of Proud



 
Blau - Blue 38,5 x 48,5 cm pastel/ink by Karin Goeppert


 
PRIDE

is a fixed bayonet
with which you
run screaming toward the enemy’s trenches.
It’s me ready to shoulder through a pack
of young muscular Turks
blocking the sidewalk, Karin’s shivery fingers
in my hand as she trails a little behind
muttering idiot, idiot, let’s cross the street.
Too late, honey, we’re surrounded.
But we cross the street anyway. It’s almost never too late.