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, September 20, 2015

Rikki don't lose that Number



 
Lyrisches Zwischenspiel - Lyric Interlude 48,5 x 33 cm Pastell - available -



THAT CARNIVAL THING

The works of man, woman,
beast of field and barn yard
on display at our local Food Fair
in plastic wrapped tableau vivant
look good enough to eat. Still,
I see no Renaissance up ahead
no Enlightenment with its bitchy
wit and powdered wigs and do we really  
need to revisit the Age of Woodstock
with its hygiene issues and bad hair
yet the road beckons and some of its
attendant trees are rather pretty   
shadows standing out in subtle relation   
to their forbearers and in which the new masses,
painted with colorful tatts, lovingly pierced, have fun
smiles stretching like a dancer on the subway. They party
at Carnival, while the rest of us stay at home, immersed
in the fourth episode of season three. Which is preferable
to an encounter with some dread-locked desperado
who, on the night bus, reads back to us
our own address before saying, “Later, dude.” That’s   
when all you want from life is a cool, gray,
mediocre morning in Berlin. Here’s what’s required—
take a number. Submit the paperwork.
Patiently await the results of clerical negligence.
Waiting is easier now; waiting is rest.



 


Sunday, September 13, 2015

Les Fleurs du Mal




Les Fleurs du Mal 80 x 80 cm acryl/gesso on linen canvas - available -



THE PERILS OF PLEASURE

My adventures in pleasure began
with twenty-four jars of baby food a day.
Grew so large I couldn’t move anymore,
dwarf whale stranded in its playpen. Since then there’s  
vintage Medoc, Lamb chops sprinkled with rosemary
and olive oil, lingerie photo spreads, the prose of Ben Lerner,
“the isles of Greece, the isles of Greece, “ und so weiter.
I’ve enjoyed life too much to deserve a career. Pleasure 
is even available to the guy who sleeps beneath 
the same tree in the park each night, smoking a self-rolled,    
inhaling so deeply there’s nothing left to exhale. Enjoyment as   
animal right, maybe, but even Epicurus thought we have
a problem with pleasure, the more we get
the more we want, and it’s never enough. Take Don Draper in “Mad Men”
fucking every woman who’s half-way willing, most
of whom quite a bit more than half-way,
yet whose unhappiness is a multiplex of many screens.
Raised in a whore house which, seen loosely, is
his version of twenty-four jars of baby food a day.
Bring ‘em on—willing women, lamb chops, etc.— as “W”
disastrously put it. On “The West Wing” someone says, a little too
sonorously, “I serve at the pleasure of the President.” Which
sounds about as enticing as a long weekend in Detroit, in winter, alone.




Sunday, September 6, 2015

In Transition





 
Mauerblümchen - Wallflower 80 x 100 cm acryl/dispersionsfarbe/ink on canvas

IN TRANSITION

The cable installation dude looks as if he’s been doing push-ups
all of his life. He’s eying your wife steadily,
unabashedly. Given the context, scenario, the looming
event horizon you consider a response. Why not
strangle the fuckwit with one of Cynthia’s
push-up bras? For once a touch of punning poetic justice.
But aggression’s leaking away replaced by a softer,
gentler, more fluidly feminine substance. Headaches keep 
circling back, settling in like sodbusters in the north-east
sector of empty territory once known as your brain. Life loving
sociopaths, charlatans in sharkskin suits, used to lurk there,
replaced now by a midwife, two hairdressers,
a depressed clerk weeping in a broom closet. What’s this all about?
Your analyst has suggested you take up ballet, as if lifting
a fifteen year old girl over your head and sprinting rather
daintily through a bevy of dying swans just might clarify
certain “issues” in your life. Soloists lined up at the barre.
Staring into the mirror, nubile Denise asks you to sit on her 
upright feet, your manly weight needed to bend, reshape, deform.
“I’ll get back to you later,” you say, then lock yourself in a bathroom
stall in which you dig through your “dance” bag, like mom searching
frantically for her lipstick, a clean tissue, so long ago—you’ve taken to crying
in elevators. Must be the music, the sad songs. Those testosterone blues.