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 29, 2016

Tales of Disaster and Ineptitude





Nothing ever stops 40 x 50 cm acryl painting by Karin Goeppert




TALES OF DISASTER AND INEPTITUDE

It’s time to rely on my favorite drugs.
Bowl of something pungent. Turkish kebab, 
side-order of fries. Shame tossed out
the window like a slightly warped Frisbee.   
Good to go, I go. No need to dump all
I own into a crippled shopping cart, stumble down a wormhole
the size of the Cow Palace, resurface in ‘73 at a 
Who concert, Pete Townshend pleading with
the crowd to cough up a substitute drummer
for the temporarily distracted (unconscious) Keith Moon
when I am lured on stage, bait being a free six-pack of Bud,
and acquit myself honorably in “Baba O’ Riley”)—
no, I’ll just show up half-shitfaced at dinner parties,
frazzled beyond repair by multiple confusions,
delighting my friends with tales of disaster and ineptitude.
Thank God Carnival is about to start. Party bus packed
with celebrants. Not an introvert in this…what are we precisely,
my dear Watson, menagerie, tableau vivant,
collection of wannabe hipsters? What a thing to wannabe.
Yet, here we are, all hyped up for shock and awe,  
posing for a selfie that future generations can admire,
paradise being whatever you post  
for instant posterity. A bag of glazed doughnuts
in Florida. A smile that won’t quit.  




Sunday, May 22, 2016

Grossstadtgeflüster - Big City Whispers



A post about big city life - a somewhat cocky, fresh Berlin post. This is the city we live in, this is what we experience every day. We live in a part of Berlin that is a bit wild and where at one point the alternative scene lived. Now in the 21st century things are quite a bit different, a lot of gentrification going on but you can still find some wild stuff - like this video. It was shot quite close to here, in one of the subway stations of the line we take every day. 

Ein post über das Großstadtleben - frech wie Berlin oft ist. Das ist die Stadt in der wir leben, so erleben wir es jeden Tag. Wir leben in Kreuzberg, einem Stadtteil, der mal wilder war als die anderen, in dem die alternative Szene lebte. Jetzt, im 21. Jahrhundert ist alles etwas anders. Wir werden gentrifiziert, aber man kann doch immer noch ein paar wilde Sachen erleben - wie z.B. das video. Es wurde hier ganz in der Nähe aufgenommen. Auch in einer U-Bahn-Station der Linie, die wir alle täglich benutzen.

Cyclades 24 x 30 cm mixed media on canvas by Karin Goeppert

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE SUBJECT

According to reports 345 people
in the city go missing every year. That’s
almost one per day. Nobody knows where
they go nor seems to care. Still, it
does give us a topic to explore 
on a warm summer evening as we sip wheat beer,
an intermittent fragrance of ginger and curry drifting    
out of The Black Hole of Calcutta’s kitchen window. A cyclist
puffing on a joint is just enough of a dick
to hog most of the sidewalk, which infuriates my wife.
Sometimes she blocks the way, but that’s martyrdom.
I suggest a couple of hands-on solutions. Carry a sharp object   
with which you can puncture tires. Or one of those little 
hammers doctors use to test a body’s reflexes,
which would allow you to attack the problem directly.
In a sprawling, dirty, loud, indifferent city
pocked with inner-recesses  
deep inside brightly painted courtyards 
linked by graffiti-spattered catacomb-like tunnels
it’s not difficult to conceal a blunt object. After
you wipe off the blood and finger prints, you’re good to go.
Near the subway station in Neukölln you can still see holes
gouged out of buildings: Russian bullets, WW 2. Francis Bacon
painted violence as the governing force of life. Yet all we want is    
to sit on a sunlit bench, roll up our sleeves, and let the world drift away.   




Sunday, May 15, 2016

Morrocan Garden


Marokkanischer Garten - Morrocan Garden 50 x 50 cm acryl painting by Karin Goeppert




OLD MASTER ITALIAN PAINTING

is a lot about fabric and
its folded textures. Hair as a formal
statement mounted on what is
so much more than pretty  
in its aura of self-acceptance
that we can only accept it with misgivings—we’ve
known a few people with that dark magic: sign
up for my religion, they seem to say, or
turn away at your loss; either way you’re screwed—
and the pain of sorrow so exquisitely  
arranged in a Botticelli Madonna
that it could be the visual definition of
radically decelerated ecstasy. She looks like
she has a very bad cold, but you know
it’s more than that. She, this post-pagan,
strawberry blond Cassandra—she’s seen something awful.   
Here’s what makes her post-: she gives in too easily, no struggle.  
Too much pity and you’re lost; not enough you’re not nice.
Either way someone’s screwed. Outside  
a woman’s disappointment with you is text book,
almost clinical. What her face seems to express 
as you play soccer with a plastic coffee cup—
and which goes a shade darker
when you glance up just in time to glimpse a 
bright-skinned girl skateboarding by, glimpse turning
into elaborate, open-mouthed, speechless desire—
could render the stupid thoughtful for a second.




Sunday, May 8, 2016

A Day in the Park


Ein Tag im Park - A Day in the Park 80 x 80 cm c/o Karin Goeppert





DIVA

In a better world,
yes, in the world of our betters
Diva’s robes are as blue as a starless night 
   coercing an uneasy elite
lit by moonlight on putting irons
into a pattern of progress then back again
to the pleasures of John Cheever ( phalanx
of whisky breathed    trust-fund dipshits    dressed in Lacoste
           shod sockless in loafers)    hints of
white collar indiscretion wedged between
                                   a suburban mansion’s mossy cracks.
Equipped with miles of floss the Feds ride in
with their Siren: strawberry blond, brooding Monica Vitti
fresh from Sorrento (circa 1966) has most of our undivided lust.
“Fuck with me,” she whispers hoarsely, “I WILL kick your ass.”
Which makes some of us rethink our initial fantasy
involving a pink motel beneath palm trees and drinks
           on the terrace, etc.
In the old days she. Are those plateaus or platforms? Go, girl
whimpers the past as she pistol whips it into submission.
I’d love to introduce her to Lisbeth as played by Roony Mara.
Pour myself a drink. Set up the sub-titles. Put all calls on hold.  





Sunday, May 1, 2016

Illusion of Order in the Shopping Mall


Illusion of Order 25 x 30 cm acryl on canvas



ELVIS/ TUPELO,  MISSISSIPPI

Avatar of cool breaking the law
just because it’s, like, there
(Marlon Brando’s character
in the “Wild One” who when asked
by a village elder what he’s rebelling against
says, “Whatdaya got?”)
and the rock n’ roll
heard on a sidewalk
in Tupelo, Miss., for twenty
some years   
named the most
American city in
America (which on
many levels seems
totally bizarre to me. As if Bayonne
were deemed the “Frenchest” city in France
length of baguettes, rankness of cheese
at issue among other things, etc.);  
criteria?
Two shopping malls
in stores of which assault weapons stand
tall, oiled, erect, shining in their racks;
a universal love of football and fried food,
the natives as supersized as what they  
feed on—pizza burger hot-dog pop corn
chocolate chip raspberry ice-cream, etc.—
drifting through the malls chewing
shuffling along draped in the oversized
football jerseys of their favorite teams,
mouth breathers, too, plus the occasional
meth head and white supremacist,
God fearing native born Americans
looking for some air-conditioned fun,
a spectacle that seems to have
no historical precedence. T.
Town the birthplace of
the man with the magic hips:
people everywhere
erecting altars to the “King”
in their trailer homes
reporting sightings of that royal personage
wiggling his fat butt in a Vegas parking lot, etc.
What have we learned?
That lovers in whom we’ve
foolishly placed our hopes
turn out at the end of
a sticky day in the Mississippi Delta
to be hound dogs after all?
Maybe.
Tupelo, Mississippi
where the heat, like Elvis, is always
making a comeback. Today
a pleasant seventy-five, by
Friday we will be swimming through
the high nineties.
I feel vaguely
Malaysian or Bengali  
nodding off
in my rickshaw
waiting for
the monsoon
and the only Elvis I’d listen to now ( Elvis
von Tupelo I mean)
would be his basement tapes of classical Indian ragas.  
(FYI: the last surviving Elvis lives in Canada
which, on a number of levels, is totally bizarre to me.)