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, December 10, 2017

Contemplate This



 
Abstract Meadow 21 x 29.7 pastel on paper c/o Karin Goeppert




CONTEMPLATE THIS

I’m trying to be a better person.
I really want to improve.
I usually only eat meat that’s been
coddled from “stable to table.”
I renounce violence at least
three times a week. Still,
I almost regret not deconstructing
my wife’s first boyfriend’s distinctly sagging
inexplicably self-satisfied face
when he dropped by for dinner
during the Great Heat Wave of 2011—
deconstruction, yeah, that’s it, between dessert
and a lovely espresso with a splash of grappa in
it would have literally hit the spot.

Therapeutically minded
I contemplate various forms
of domestic plant life. The slightly
nodding fronds are reassuringly mute
yet an orchid’s pale creamy petals
as pale and creamy as sauce
over one of those pigs, roasted now,
who, if you believe the PR department
died happy—and over Swabian pasta—
make me think of W. eating and talking
talking and eating
and all I want to do
is disable his point of view.

The world is made of ten-thousand opinions.
Whose logic isn’t exhausting? At the same time
the trees are ecstatic with birds, their
give-and-take mercifully indecipherable.
Swirling flocks of swallows
soaring and dipping in Cairo
doing somersaults in Athens, in Berlin
and there I go again—just can’t stop dropping those names.




Sunday, November 12, 2017

The mountains, The mountains


The scary Climb 40 x 30 cm mixed media on paper





MOUNTAIN LOVE

What can you say about mountains?
That you can’t fit them into a phone? But, look, you can.
When I’m on top of one of
them I’m a little high because I’m short
of oxygen after the climb and take huge
gulps of air to compensate, a pulmonary phenomenon  
Brad Pitt coolly elucidates in “Fight Club.”  
I’m inspirationally
high…sometimes. Other times I’m somewhat numb, a little
detached, wondering what kind of beer I’ll have with
my schnitzel when we’re gemütlich and sleepy in town. And
I’m wondering but it’s no wonder they put cheese on everything
in the Gasthäuser; emmentaler, greyerzer; bells clanking
lethargically when the cows lick their muddy hides, their
tongues, great pink saliva laced slabs, reaching out, touching you,
like an old commercial for long distance phone calls.
Some of the higher peaks here look like
they’ve been in a fight, are gorgeously deformed.
Others have grass growing on steeply slanting faces, softening,
but still irredeemably aloof. They will not be walked upon.
Music to accompany these writhing piles of rock shouldn’t be Wagner
or Strauss. I would prefer the Miles Davis of “Kind of Blue”
or something tense but quiet by Charles Mingus. Water breathing   
out cold air as it falls; music so cool it almost can’t be bothered.




Sunday, November 5, 2017

Art and Poetry for several occasions



 
Maremma 40 x 50 cm ink/ashes on canvas




POEM FOR SEVERAL OCCASIONS

If only there was botox
for the brain. Unsightly bulges
and crevices flattened and filled. The limbic
system tightened up. No more hard feelings,
no jitterbugging hesitations. A constant cool front
moving in; you chill; you bop. Anything goes
and we’re loving it. Like writers who
are heartlessly literal: we call a
fish a fish. Squirming on the hook,
it’s still a fish, isn’t it?  
That’s life, as Sinatra sang. You bend over
to pick up a cheese burger and trigger a booby trap.
That was life.
Speaking of booby traps: touch a girl’s
knee, you’re out of a job. Then you remember
Nietzsche, what he wrote about the debilitating
effects of power on intelligence. Nailed that one.
No, life is a rum commercial in 1989. That’s what we want.
But who knows how many takes it took to get it right?
Anyone out there privy to that info?
When a very young whore, I mean young— so young
she reminds you of somebody’s baby sister
the night of her junior prom—staggers out
of her pimp’s Hummer, in Prague maybe
or Warsaw no less, she’s still a whore, isn’t she? Her bruises
are predictable, even banal. Still, you wince, you wince
and try to forget that you’re a bit of a softy after all; maybe  
have a sister somewhere. Still, this is the world. This is how
the world plays its game. But the red, that red,
no matter its—contextual relevance?—belongs inside.





Sunday, October 8, 2017

Fireworks




 
Floris 56 x 42 cm acrylic on paper





THE KING’S DAUGHTERS
                                                             …you think you’re so clever and classless and free
                                                             But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.
                                                                  From WORKING CLASS HERO, John Lennon


The King’s daughters made their father a gift of
three Arabian steeds, after which he chopped off
their husbands’ heads—some plot
or other, badly planned, sloppily carried out—
   rain pattering down
on the blood-slicked platform. A concert, banners shaken
by a rowdy spring wind, a procession, the entire
court admiring itself on horseback. Thousands of the unwashed
surging against a wall of palace guards the plumes
of whose helmets a glossy, sticky-looking red. Another royal wedding, another
stiff-limbed cadet, undistinguished but impressively uniformed, marching
to the scaffold of an open carriage, always the same one
the ecstatic multitude, lining the roads, applauding every
procedure: a million flags hanging limply from damp fists.  



Sunday, September 24, 2017

Seeing Things



 
Sunny Meadow 29,5 x 20,5 cm mixed media on brown paper




SEEING THINGS

Domestic bliss was
not on the agenda.
Seeing through step-father # 1—socio-
pathic flim-flam artist with two
maybe three aliases and five marriages
on his rap sheet—for a few   
fairly adventurous years, then
clean through and right out the other  
side of step-father # 2, witlessly transparent,
arms and legs aggressive animals
not knowing who to hit or kick next; then another life   

later looking at a view from the cliff  
isle of Hydra 
one hot eucalyptus-scented day
swimming off the rocks with
three flight attendants from Quantas
eating feta for the first time ever
investigating the tannic properties of retsina
meeting a girl of such virtue
her skin left burn marks on my finger tips    

See the Acropolis
and die, no, that’s not it, see Naples and drop dead
or at least hallucinate
in a tall narrow alley-way where
squinting accurately I see
a mirage of the Roman empire
in the twenty first-century AD
birds in cages outside tiny windows
pumping out a little street music
and now we’re here
in the midst of a cease fire on the verge of truce
“Jungle Blues” on the turntable
fragrance of orange, of buttered toast and honey, coffee
good strong coffee and there you are old
enemy now nearly my best friend again wrapped up in
turquoise bathrobe smiling into a hand-painted tea cup
planning your day as if all you have ever known is peace.