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 31, 2016

Mr Miller dreams of his Mistress



 
Mr Miller dreams of his Mistress 100 x 80 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert




“SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR AND SOMETIMES THE BEAR EATS YOU”
                                                   
                                                                        In a buckthorn hedge, I saw a family of long
                                                                        tailed tits. The white-headed, Scandinavian kind.
                                                                                                                 Nell Zink
                                                                          
Striving for some kind of symmetry
that falls apart in his battered old hands
he starts to cry, slowly. It’s not my fault.
Some forces are too strong to argue with.
Order is to chaos what destiny is to chance, etc.
Even the wind concedes this point as it devours our sail.
The other night I have this weird dream about a blind date.
The lamb with garlic in lemon sauce looks delicious
yet has the texture and taste of sandpaper.
The wine’s an insult: bouquet of hay soaked in acid rain.
And my date’s talk, well, it’s brilliant enough, I guess,
but she resembles a fledgling Richard Nixon, maybe a niece
or cousin, and I fear she might start shaking her  
incipient jowls, give a backward preview of No, I am not a liar
and you won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,
then offer a final pathetic wave from Marine One, etc.
And if she has to shave her pits, legs, privates twice a day
the way Dick had to shave his famous face, she isn’t talking.
While in line for a frozen yogurt as follow-up to my kraut-dog
the other day (as if trying to prove that indigestion’s a categorical   
imperative) I got to thinking about Decline and Fall…of people.
That it really is a closed system. And that all our fears and nightmares
wander in drunk and deluded, coming off some dreadful meds,
a waste of energy. It is maturity—gradual refinement— that matters:
a pinot noir that feels like silk and tastes like paradise:
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis jamming as the hour turns blue.




Sunday, July 24, 2016

Jazz


Downtown 30 x 22,5 cm ink/watercolour/graphite on paper c/o Karin Goeppert




JASS*

Things spread—germs, people’s opinions,
beer bellies, you name it—
because it’s so hot around here.

Thin sheen of sweat on a working girl’s skin, for instance,
some kind of tense perfume
coming off it, dirty feet shapely in embroidered thongs.

The growth, you can’t believe it, just
keeps coming on, everything from moss
to palmetto to the idea behind a melody.

It would seem that the whole point
of darkness is shouldered into a heap
of syncopated rhythms.

Imagine someone coming along,
scooping them up
in his ditty bag and, walking out the door,

dumping its contents into the water supply.
Odd but happy feelings occur.
Friends start

talking fluent saxophone, eyes red,
blessed with cool and cannabis.
   You question them.
But all you get are tired smiles straight from Birdland.


*Legend or truth, I can’t say, but the term Jazz apparently evolved out
of “jass,” short for jasmine, the preferred scent worn by the prostitutes of
Storyville, New Orleans, birth place of a great American music tradition.
Birdland, of course, a famous jazz club in New York City.




Sunday, July 17, 2016

Italian Movie


3 Gefässe 2 - 3 Vessels 2 42 x 56 cm Dispersionsfarbe/Tinte - wallpaint/ink/acrylic medium c/o Karin Goeppert





ITALIAN MOVIE

Right now dreaming my way around
a hot room perfumed by bunches of lilies
stuffed into a score of vases and earthen-ware pots
under a baroque rotunda in the Tuscan countryside.
A young woman with a beautiful bare back
playing a piece by J.S. Bach(from BWV 988) on a grand piano
which looks as if it’s been given a coat of lip gloss
just before the performance.  
Her family’s lumped together in a cheering section of sorts, i.e.,
clap or die seems to be the message.
Everyone applauds enthusiastically so no one gets hurt.

Now I am inside the head of an older man
in the audience, an aristocrat from the look of him,
silk tie, sumptuous shark-skin jacket, cheekbones
bespeaking generations of selective breeding. As him, I am beginning
to swell with an inexplicable sense of my own entitlement and
self-importance all out of proportion with what I’ve accomplished
in life and am admiring the girl soloist’s long olive-hued
dimpled back with its faint scatter of pretty moles and delicate  
articulation of finely inlaid muscle during the fugue, and in my thoughts
she’s naked, bound hand and foot to the lowered piano lid
upon which I am having my lordly way with her, enacting the
Tuscan version of droit de seigneur. The woman sitting next to me
is probably my wife, eyes closed, chins resting on a pearl necklace,

dreaming of dinner parties and snoring softly. Cherubs are chasing

amazingly fat nymphs across the ceiling, which reminds an American girl
   sitting in the audience(unable to fully fathom her jabberwockian
Marketing Studies (sic?) majorette soul, I cannot be her)
of a shopping mall in Iowa. The cherubs are beefy football players
from the high school, and the fabulously fat nymphs could be
any local girls over the age of sixteen. She’s pretty much ripped
on a bottle of Vino Santo(16% alc.) which she shared with her
boy friend before the concert began. Picking through the contents of her mind
   I come across a jumble of Victoria’s
Secret under things and shoes and more shoes and a basketball gym dance
after which she lost her virginity and now I witness a fit of  
pique over a rather large zit that dominates her chin
(damn those Italian desserts!)  
plus the echo of a student who earlier mentioned
the state of something called “Italian Cinema.”
   “What,” she might have asked,
“is an Italian movie? Would that be something with Sylvester Stallone in it?
Or, like, one of those boring ancient “Godfather” type flicks that my
dad thinks are s-o-o-o awesome?” She has no idea of course that she’s nothing
beneath the frescoes above her and the frescoes nothing beneath Tuscan sky.
And what of our lovely soloist?
Whose string, as it were, did she pull to get here
this stifling lily-sweet evening, and I hope she never stops.