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, January 31, 2016

Venice Revisited


Redwood 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas c/o Karin Goeppert




CAMPO DEI FRARI

Ignoring a swarm of super cute Japanese snap shooters
aesthetes come and go talking of Carpaccio, but they
aren’t dragging their surfboards and their knuckles
behind them, because we are not in Venice, Ca.,

we’re in the other Venice, the one where rising water soaks
sneakers in a heartbeat. Shoppers jostle our unquiet appetites 
and we theirs, each of us in a frantic search for artifacts. I buy a pair
of black dress shoes in a shop the size of a closet. I look at pictures by

Titian and Bellini in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. I eat overpriced,
not very good pizza. I think about my apartment in Berlin. Why   
does that basil near the kitchen window smell like cat pee? Why do I feel
that if I just had a row boat all of my problems would be solved?

Because I’m lost, hemmed in by water, that’s why. O Byzantine scribes,
strutting charioteers of the 6th century, I dream about home
when I’m here and about here when I’m home. Why is that?
Scientists don’t have much to say on the subject. Issues of the spirit

not easily testable, which is why poets and novelists still manage 
dubiously to teach at colleges that resemble Venice
vaguely (here a bell tower, there a loggia) no matter how
   whorish and worldly the template
before the sons and daughters of Nippon posed giggling in its odors and shadows.



 

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Hydra


Gartenfieber I - Gardenfever I 100 x 80 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert




HYDRA

It would seem there’s nothing
better to do in Iowa than to turn
a prize-winning hog into a heap
of barbecue on paper plate,
potato salad hugging
its oily flank, or turning a
sonnet sequence into tenure,
or your wife into my special friend,
sifting through
the fragments, making things up as we go along.
Remember what 4-H stands for?
Neither do I.

No hogs on this Saronic Island.
Just scores of donkeys more or
less inedible but essential—
no cars, just a garbage truck—
for hauling stuff and tourists around.
The hairy waiter’s face is lit up
with a yellow-toothed leer—mother-
fucker also seems to like your wife—as he
smuggles on-the-house ouzo to your table
and you, hammered, nothing but fragments
no one’s bothering to sift through.

This isn’t Iowa, Mary. The island’s harbor
town curling up into the burning blue
nutmeg-cinnamon-cumin odor
redolent of sex on a warm afternoon
in summer. Your mind, finally catching
up with your body, begins to loosen up.
Suspicions fade away. Your dreams
are in technicolor. Back from a swim
you are just in time for lunch—
she’s making tomato salad with those big chunks
of feta cheese and those fat Kalamata olives
you love so much, whose praise you sing endlessly,
and she’s poured you a glass of
crisp retsina—lunch on a hot Greek island 
just the two of you watching the play of light
on flowers and white washed stone buildings
is not only better than most dreams
it might even be one.




Sunday, January 3, 2016

Windflüchter - Windtrees



Windflüchter - Windtrees 60 x 50 cm - acryl on linen canvas





ONE DAY BY THE SEASIDE

Moving through dry brown grass,
through sea oats, down to the sand,
into the cold surf, ankles, knees,
chest, shoulders, and then we swam out
to a jetty upon which white-clad models
or investment bankers were drinking a 
pale golden beverage out of slender glasses. They could
have been shooting a commercial for luxurious fabrics
or a sparkling wine from the hills outside Verona.
Treading water, we heard some of their conversation,
relieved to discover that despite their elegance
and apparent wealth these lovely, subtly tanned people
were either witless sycophants or sex addicts. It was getting cold,
so we stroked back to the boardwalk where some artistes were
plying their trade. A little juggling, some Simon and Garfunkel on a
blind dude’s accordion. Crusty sea critters & fries from a stand nearby.
Later that evening we allowed ourselves to be swallowed up
by a large party near the bon fires. The light danced off
people’s reddish faces. Do you remember what you said as the
embers cooled? Must have been six, seven in the morning,
the sky bruised and abraded in tattered pinks and clotted charcoal
like back stage at the ballet, colors but no dancers as if painted by Degas.
I knew then that nothing we’d seen and done had made you want
to change your life. I think that’s what you said. You almost cried.
Then laughed. Maybe next year we should try somewhere else?