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, July 26, 2015

A PRESCRIPTION FROM DOCTOR DE SADE



 
Folly - 29,5 x 39,5 cm acryl on canvas - verkauft/sold



A PRESCRIPTION FROM DOCTOR DE SADE

                                                         Lust’s passion will be served; it demands,
                                                         it militates, it tyrannizes.
                                                                                               Marquis de Sade

Here, take fifty
of these and if you manage to wake up
don’t call me in the morning. Better still
I want you perched atop a column
crushed by sunlight in some stony waste of
Syria or Sinai, a martyr to your failure of nerve.

Pain and pleasure are but Siamese twins
who share a couch and a plate of pommes frites. Nevertheless
next time an opportunity comes knocking, invite it in, offer a brandy,
then sit back and see what tingles first.

Maybe not a moment of perfumed nights will follow, or the perfect spasm,
though plenty of delicious remorse—think of your wife, her evenings
spent knitting a hair shirt for your conscience— oh sweat-drenched   
insomniac—or your husband working overtime to buy you
that vacation in Mazatlan you’ve always wanted—and no regrets to speak of. 



Sunday, July 12, 2015

In a Spanish Garden





 
Verregneter Sommer - Rainy Summer 50 x 60 cm acryl -verkauft/sold


SOME PLACES

Some places seem to have more beauty
than the natives know what to do with. So we
have come here to manage their surplus. But all I

can do is think about the past, a useless non-
beautiful activity, producing emotional re-runs
featuring Regret, Humiliation, Eternal Embarrassment.

I go on an uphill speed march through an olive grove
to sweat it all out, and test my muscles, breathe a little
and think about the lamb I’m going to have for dinner

at a restaurant with turn of the last century Majorcan
Art-Nouveau atmosphere, a fanciful, curvaceous staircase
of exquisitely carved woodwork and turquoise tiles on the walls.

And there’s an actual dumb waiter lifting delicious food  
from a subterranean kitchen. We are going to eat in the garden
amid moonlight, palm trees, Spanish architecture, the air warm

and sweet with jasmine and pines. Returning from my forced march
I find Karin working in the back yard that we are renting
along with a bungalow—formerly a storage shed for oranges  

and wine, where we sleep and watch soccer on television. She’s trimming
and primping the flowers, and before I go in she looks at me, squints
and says, “You look gruesome.” Something to think about in the shower. 



Round Top Festival Institute, Saturday June 9, 2012, Texas Festival Orchestra

Sunday, July 5, 2015

So what?



 
Der Duft des Sommers - The Scent of Summer 3 x 10 x 10 cm - acryl/shellack ink on canvas - available!


AN UNATURAL HISTORY OF PROGRESS

There’s jazz in the courtyard, moonlight espresso, grandma
issuing dire warnings in archaic dialect, grandpa
sneaking off to the boiler room, to conspire with tobacco.

The streets are without porn.
Bump and grind if you can find it, yes, but no porn.
A manhole hissing fiercely nearby. Kids playing stickball, but gingerly,

for it is Sunday, and they are wearing their best.
Plague germinating on rotting hulks in Sythian ports,
sailing on to Naples and Palermo, devastating Rome,

depopulating Florence, shutting down theatres in London.
Peasant and lord scarfing raw garlic and, as if longing
for their bacterial beginnings, washing neither bodies nor garments,

a mad flurry of Ostrogoths or Visigoths
spilling over city walls, smashing monasteries, no one bathing
for hundreds of years, Donald Trump always

coming back to take more, castor oil, chemo therapy
which just kills you more slowly than cancer, it seems,
public executions family reunions Hitler and his Huns

Bush #2 and his version thereof, chronology a side issue at best—

   shit just keeps happening—
until: a shriveled, oily hot dog in a soft bun at Woolworth’s
on a Saturday afternoon, circa 1968, Concord, California

one hundred degrees outside, not much cooler inside,
the air salty and dark, an odor of rancid butter
coming from the pop corn maker, add to that a

purloined copy of “Ring” magazine,
George Chuvalo and Buster Mathis
pounding each other on its front cover,

snug and damp beneath t-shirt and jeans, and I feel
well-fed, with half my “dog” in hand, and as cunning as a gangster:
thus progress makes its belated appearance in human affairs.