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, May 31, 2015

Watch Out



 
Vorbereitung auf den Angriff- Preparing for Attack 50 x 70 cm acryl/ink on canvas



SPRING CHICKEN
                                              What is more precise than precision? Illusion.
                                                                                       Marianne Moore

The way hesitation gets
worked into the ageing process,
as if all the wheels and levers of decision

were rusted up. Yes, it does suck, said
the little man with big cigar and handful  
of firecrackers—it being the Fourth and all—a little more  

certainty might help. Just a touch. When you were young      
life was all hurry up and wait for that Big Break  
to come sauntering up the front steps, say something    

interesting, assorted head hunters dropping by     
with languid sexually enhanced females  
filling your hot tub and talking, like, real slow. Then you wake up

in a thin-skinned bungalow, at the back of
an old friend’s property, amid the weeds, and you’re 35, then 45, then
and your flip-flops are worn down uneven, and you limp for some reason.   

To fiddle for a while with Rimbaud’s definition of self: “I”  
is every role you have ever played plus that certain something
unique: its due date, if you will, its shelf life. Okay, fair enough. Then what?

“Watch out,” slurs the lead singer just before
the guitar break: the gods are jealous of their privileges:
at the end of the nightshift don’t expect any overtime.




Sunday, May 24, 2015

Medley




 
Medley 30 x 24 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert




THE SWEET AND THE SOUR

Keep going, she said, never stop.
The first place was a window seat
near a picture of Mary and her Little Lamb,
the window right above an approximately vertical   
driveway and she, unofficial goddess of mirth,
threatening to dangle us from the window ledge. Proving?
Even mothers can have a fairly fucked-up sense of humor.

The second place had lemons and limes
pieces of which floated in the potent beverages
   of village elders.
The third place was a desert landscape.
A cactus garden in the side yard. It scared me. It
was too sharp. There was grapefruit with sugar sprinkled on top
paving a soft pink highway to the sweet and sour, the wisdom
of precisely mixed opposites, and that you could eat them with breakfast.

Then:
                                                                              a seminal scene
from Fellini Satyricon: a naked African girl
in bed with two smitten bi-sexual boys,
chattering in a pretty language no man can understand
but wants to listen to for the rest of his life, her breasts
like two small perfect fruits you might find
ripening in some amply watered oasis in Ethiopia or Somalia,
her hands like elegant birds hovering in space—
though where the sour amid all of this sweetness might be
found is not entirely clear, and should remain so,
and why this scene should be deemed “seminal” is
not all that clear either, but we will leave it at that—

and a crucial moment in “Sentimental Education” when Flaubert
has Frederic Moreau feel compassion for the gray haired woman
he glimpses briefly behind shutters,
the older woman he was obsessed with in his youth
when the sweet and the sour
wouldn’t have been seen on the same plate together
speaks for itself, and that is enough.
 



Friday, May 15, 2015

Coming Home



 
Reclining Figure 80 x 60 cm c/o Karin Goeppert


BEAUTY

You deep read some pretty girl’s mangled syntax
as if it were a dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets.
Alone, the spectacle of her thighs invites sonnets and arias.
Curled up on her lap are your dirtiest thoughts,
brimming with ambition. But instead of making your day
she makes you put snow tires on her car, a cute
little import, and says “Thanks, “dad,” ” as she hands you ten bucks.

The mushrooms are ravishing: freckled, tinged ochre, shapely.
Some of them look like very attractive underwater creatures.
But only the reckless would eat them. The ignorant
or self-destructive. Just look at them. And what of those
other “shrooms”, the dried-out kind locked up in a baggy, which
if they could sing would sound just like the lovely Grace Slick?

I’m looking at a post-modern
cave painting, some interestingly orchestrated
slabs of color, or I’m looking at a sheepish Ulysses
drag a half-empty wine skin into his wife’s bed; she stops
curling her eight pound novel, smiles, flexes, reluctantly reassures,
“Of course I missed you, you big pussy.” Now, that’s pretty.