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, August 30, 2015

Coming into Focus





 
Coming into Focus 60 x 60 cm mixed media - available -




QIANA                       
                                                                          A lightweight
                                                               manmade fiber chemically classed
                                                                            as nylon.
                                                                                    THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY

After the confusion is packed away—
precipitated by an Erik Rohmer girl  
blessed with the morals of late antiquity, say,
and bitter little pouches beneath
her eyes—and we ship it off like toxic waste
to a needy, cash-poor country
in equatorial Africa, we learn
to stretch our muscles in new ways,
in new words. The garden seems fresher then,
the Philosopher takes his pleasure calmly
and the Poet takes dictation calmly, and we take a break
from the daily idiocy, which sounds like a newspaper
and sometimes is, the colors astoundingly attentive
to our needs, like lovers, like lovers who really love us,
though no one in her right mind could possibly love me
nor you, for that matter, sorry, nor him nor her,
apologies, I mean come on is anyone really lovable
I think Ann Carson admitted in the Paris Review
that she’s a monster, that all of us are monsters
which is exactly what you might expect a classics professor/modernist poet
to say, that is, bronze age fatalism plus Avant-garde
pessimism equals: it doesn’t matter what and how
much we sacrifice to the gods our blue print
is left unaltered, that is, human beings
are excellent at making poems, pictures, bombs
and we can be so so so beautiful
but as far as living life goes, well, we’re pretty much
fuck ups, often getting stuck on issues such as
what would you do if all of your shirts were
made of nylon? There you are, sweating in the high school gym
dancing to ELO, the Bee Gees, almost happy. Everything
glistening, like ice, like a nylon shirt, like a headache
in the south of France—not enough bread, sweetie, or cheese— and I  
hadn’t a sou, and there’s hardly a fate worse than being hungry   
and sou-less in France, and because the old men were smoking their little
cigars in the 2nd class waiting room, laughing, having a hell of a good time. 




Sunday, August 23, 2015

The World drifts in




 
Dog Rose V 40 x 50 cm acryl/spray paint on canvas - available -



GARY COOPER’S REAL AGE

A Swedish woman in Madrid helped us out
   she wore a blue uniform, a little red hat, tour guide
go to the youth hostel, she said, there you will find shelter
   what we found was an endless line
of young Europeans each holding a regulation bed sheet
   they looked different from us, noses and cheekbones
emphatic as if their faces had been fashioned from
the cobblestone road that runs between palace and cathedral
stoic boredom in their eyes traces of irony
   around their mouths
I remember walking under the orange trees of Cordoba 
   longing for a cigarette
   it was Sunday morning in southern Spain
   you can’t buy things Sunday mornings in Europe
   well regulated fountains splashing down
   to the Jewish Quarter, no Jews now though, expelled in 1492, no more Jews
after Columbus sailed the ocean
   took my first shit on the continent at a train station
Spanish-French border, Port Bou (Spain) Cerbère (France) the toilet (Turkish)
   room for the feet either side of a hole     interesting, non?
French border official looked like a Gallic Paul McCartney
   sans bass guitar sans Liverpool accent
had steak and pommes frites for dinner got lost in the Louvre
before it became Facebook showcase for selfie-taking philistines
   (thus bitched the old man, all day and well into the night)
Californians tossing Frisbees in St. Peter’s square     my fellow Americans
if provoked in Europe offer an annoyingly superior smile
light a cigarette, shrug ever
   so slightly     stoic, ironic   darling do I look like
          the secretary of state
   director of CIA    chairman of the fucking board of whatever corporation’s   
        destroying our universe      can I buy you a latte at             
Starbucks?       stoic, ironic
someone actually said I looked like Gary Cooper
   Christ, I was only eighteen
Gary Cooper was always fifty, I believe, or at least forty
   but never eighteen      this is where irony might have come in handy




Sunday, August 16, 2015

Help Me



 
Ausgeschnitten - Carved out 23 x 50 cm pastel - available -


THE POET

This executive of eloquence
and he’s empty as a spoon.
Still, he’d like to mount the Erechtheum;
the Himalayas to know his weight; dip his toes in the Seine.
Nobody would dare ask him where in God’s name
he was taking them ( thematically, stylistically, wherever)
or why he can’t find anyone to iron his shirts.

He dreams of fireflies in an enchanted wood above Camogli.
He dreams of tenure. He dreams of liberating
an exotic waitress—Surinam? Macao?—enslaved
by a pancake house in Soda Springs, Illinois. He dreams
of one bottle of “Opus One” Cabernet Sauvignon. Then of two bottles
he dreams. He dreams of Cordoba, the orange trees there,
the white courtyards with tiled staircases that go
nowhere unclean, whiffs of jasmine, roasted chicken, garlic.

In his current day dream
lights are being strung from everything
in a dusty piazza, Calabria, baroque village, pagan celebration
   of some Christian holy day,
1957. The air is dry. Black haired women, warm
and moist, wearing floral-print dresses, their elegant
men dressed in white shirts and woolen slacks
with hideously elongated flies. We have no idea why

we’re here but the wine is cheap
and a few of the girls, appearing to need love,
pull us down with delicate urgency
to their talcum-powdered breasts.
In the light of a bonfire, and just what one
would expect, the village church is a
crumbling wedding cake; for about fifteen-minutes—
thanks, Andy—everyone’s a poet.




Sunday, August 9, 2015

Voyage en Orient



 
The harder they come 40 x 50 cm acryl on linen canvas - available



FLAUBERT ON TOUR

Orange trees. Bamboo matting.
Glottal stops. Coptic
divines. Observing Max Du Camp get a hand job  
in the shadows of the Great Pyramid
   is an eye-opener, the Blood  
of Egypt spreading her lethargic thighs,
slapping the sides of our dirty bateau.
Breeze rises up, lifting caftans, exposing black asses
to frantic whippings for the fun of it. Were he alive
De Sade would have booked passage, learned a thing or two.  
And then onward to Constantinople,
mindless the whole way,
getting laid whenever possible,
thoughtless in Athens, too— you yourself wrote:
when the penis rises the brain dies—though
trained by class and romantic phantasy
to reflect on the glory of old Greece, the
inspiring nobility of mountain landscapes,
light, violet crowned hills, the whole 
kit and caboodle, laurel-wreathed, of received ideas.
Then back to France
          where the next best thing
to “skewering boys like kebabs” in a Cairo bathhouse
is barbecuing the bourgeoisie in their own backyards.