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 25, 2016

What came next


Calluna 1 42 x 56 cm acryl/dispersion color/oil pastel on paper




WHAT CAME NEXT
                                             Bright gods and Tuscan…
                                             … and the clouds bowe over the lake.
                                                                   Ezra Pound, from CANTO III

Getting tired of the city, rats playing
In the garbage, the self-conscious rudeness
of  people trying too hard to be ugly. In my writing
I’d like to put gods in the trees and nymphs, etc., but
down in the basement, where the pit bull is chained,
a handful of maenads are smoking crystal. Hopelessly urban.  
Meanwhile in Italy Poggio still makes wine in his frescoed villa
near the river Arno as if there were no modern world
or post-modern or any which way you prefer to   
label what seems to be happening right now. I’m thinking of
doing a reboot that will have me walking through a vineyard
of my own.  Wearing a straw hat and baggy white linen suit.
It’s too bad the thin gurgling of water in the cistern has to
remind me that everything is running out. Bills are due. Hammock’s broken.
In the deep cool shadows of the front porch Karin
is painting my state of mind. It’s part of a
series, each picture a little bit better than the last. I break
into a two-step, attempt a pirouette. I hear paint hitting canvas.  



Sunday, September 18, 2016

Montis



 
Montis 50 x 65 cm gouache/dispersion colour/oil pastel on paper by Karin Goeppert


YOU HAVE TO WIN IN ORDER TO LOSE

The hero’s about ready to ford a
knee-deep stream—but just before he    
gets wet an annoying crone all bent and ugly
and with a voice that would make nails on a chalkboard
sound like an aria by Maria Callas
doesn’t ask but insists that he piggy back her  
across along with his magic sword and enchanted
jock strap which, at a pivotal point in the story,
he will convert into a sling, load a stone in the strap’s
roomy pouch, slay a monster blocking the mouth of a cave
in whose dark and dank reaches antiquity’s equivalent
of a Victoria’s Secrets model will be waiting between a
rock and hard place to be rescued by this young stud
who’s scheduled to take back his ailing father’s kingdom
from disloyal and exceedingly nasty army officers, etc.
most of which has been brought to you by the annoying crone
who on the other side of the stream turns into a
dazzling god or goddess who says how fortunate you are
young fellow for you have passed the test and
here, take this magic ring, put it on the finger of Selina
captive in the monster’s cave, for later she will bear you three children
one of whom will marry a real estate mogul from New York
with designs on your throne—go with your instincts,
kid, which, as we know, will get you every time.




Sunday, September 11, 2016

Are you alone?


Eiswand - Icewall 100 x 80 cm mixed media (acryl/oil/oil pastel/coffee) on canvas by Karin Goeppert




TOTAL DOUCHE BAG SOUGHT, REFERENCES UNNECESSARY

She’s looking for someone with hair, a large
tanned expanse of carpeted muscle. Add to that   
an offhand sadism, a weakness for exotic weaponry, should be    
a subtle cheat in games of chance and skill,
but no conscience in the Shakespearean
sense, no consciousness, which supposedly makes
cowards of us all, only a mechanical perfection required;

should speak a few languages, and have
an elegant, almost hypnotically persuasive way
with high level personnel in Mexican resorts,
the lowly also known to smile, if grudgingly, out of fear
because he makes everyone feel a little uncomfortable.
He would say: If it works, do it: If I do it, it works.
Marcel Proust peering through a keyhole. Millions clicking
their mouse. Fast forward, says Mistuh Kurtz, it don’t mean nuthin.