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, February 26, 2017

New, Tender, Quick


Rot-Orange II (Red-Orange II) ink/oil pastel on paper 20 x 20 cm




NEW, TENDER, QUICK

The rich complain about cooking odors/ dysfunctional
         mothers looking like gothic statues  
in an East German church/ hay rick, manure
        ditches, skin head revelry/ where the rich
                    would never go/ destined to concern
ourselves with issues trivial at best/ we read
          Elizabeth Bishop anyway, “my outlook
is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians/ barbarians
             who commit a hundred indecencies everyday of our lives…”/
trying to stay positive, still it seems you
      are not only watching TV/ you’re on it/ handcuffed and walking
into the county courthouse/ some deputy’s wind breaker
thrown over your head/ cooking odors from a food stand/
            life tastes pretty good as you raise taco to mouth/ smells,
well, interesting as you rise past the doorways of drinking associates
   and mere neighbors, radio noise, animal habits, fugitive states of mind
no one will ever capture, cowering in the manure ditch,
hay rick/ utterly trivial/ stubbornly ourselves/ “…but I think we should
be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable
    and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick,” (George Herbert).”/ whiff
of hot dogs from the river’s edge, black lab rolling in the sand/
                                     two boys and three girls emerge
        from brown water/ giddy yet watchful/ light in their hair.




Sunday, February 19, 2017

G - L - O - R - I - A


Rot-Orange I - Red-Orange I 20 x 20 cm ink on paper





WINTERMÄRCHEN

Imagine a broken-backed long-haul
truck driver or scab-fisted brick layer,
drunk, a sneer of bottomless contempt
all over his bristly face, grabbing his crotch
while quoting Pound, Eliot, even Patti Smith.

Which has nothing to do
with winter, the year ending
as it always does with every garment
feeling like a shroud. Where doth the worm sit, and why?
I think you can spare us your “thees” & “thous.”

But truck drivers and brick layers
are people too and they think about
the cold of winter and of death
flags of disenchantment
drooping from their friggin’ toothpicks.

Not everyone can afford to visit Italy,
so what is the correct distraction? Baseball
halted in its tracks just as
September slid safely into October
and football is little more than a fist fight

in a snow storm on a profoundly unwashed
Sunday in Cleveland. The costliest diversion
at the moment is our hedge fund pimp’s
collapse into insolvency—the fund is without funds,
and he’s basking in some atoll sipping Brazilian cocktails

while a native girl fiddles with his loin cloth—
only the turkey looks fulfilled, complete,
all skin and bones, even its bread-crumb stuffing—
hanging from a local poet’s sensitive
lower lip—a promise of non-stop nudity.





Sunday, February 12, 2017

The Kiss


View from the hotel balcony 56 x 42 cm mixed media on paper




WANDERVÖGEL

A green alpine
river slipping slowly past
a poetry slam with panama hats, so many things
plunging: cigar smoke, palm shadows, the
highest of necklines, dancing
followed by a banquet with all the “trimmings,”
something allegedly Austrian
done to veal—a great flattening out
of meat, bread crumbs
its skin—dumplings dumped on plates
the size of man hole covers,
boats of sauce steaming on oceans of white cloth.

After the climb we reach a hut
where an iodine-stained chamber
maid blows on our blisters
with the delicate hesitation of an April wind.
In the higher altitudes cows are still fed
thick salads of purest lucerne. It’s an economic
thing and magical properties and protein
says the guide, or History’s pain (plan), or something

because travel is educational. It might be obscure,
it might be incomprehensible, but you get a suntan
& free cocktail once a day. If you change that channel
who will ever fathom
the hay stack and the panama hat leaning
against it or soft trumpet call of tropical  
nights under clusters of alpine stars, the disbelieving river
as seen from these equatorial heights?