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 14, 2017

Barbarians


Pirouette 50 x 50 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert



BARBARIANS AT THE GARDEN GATE

In my dream are lines of coke.
In the old fashioned bottles.
Who can resist coke in the old fashioned bottles?
And castle dungeons with wall-to-wall
and big soft pillows plus baby oil  
or one of those Majorcan golf courses complete
with slender girl caddies in Catalonian attire—
but there are huge speakers out of which
ooze the greatest hits of Wham! which makes
me want to track down and punish the deejay—
plus car sickness and enhanced coercion: “If you
don’t shut up we won’t stop for tapas.” In other
words, the perks and ills of civilization. So I depart this dream
and welcome other barbarians, dinner guests,
visiting relatives, bullying past Maginot lines
of good behavior—bilious, looking like shit
after a day long ride, demanding alcohol and salty snacks.
Later, stepping out into the yard to smoke a joint, I’m
hoping for a vision of freedom, but all I can see is the back fence.




Sunday, May 7, 2017

The Greatest

Midnight Stroll ink/gouache on cotton rag paper by Karin Goeppert





HELLAS (2)

I didn’t swallow the fly
and I’m glad. Principle
as much as disgust. And the smell
of pines I will never forget,
like the last words of an old friend,
almost gone, one way or the other,
about what she will never forget.
Temple of Poseidon nothing but
a few chunks of marble embedded in dirt.
Across the gulf
the lemon groves of Galatas
in a grid of irrigation gutters
the mountains behind them
sharp-edged
like unearthed implements
from some epic blood-bath.
Tree-climbing goats.
American students puking over the side of a party boat.
Who wasn’t having fun?
The light told me of white cubic shapes, differing shades of blue,
how shade itself had differing shades of blue
the light in Greece
an authority on many subjects
saturating my glass of bathtub retsina
in the kitchen/living room of our
impoverished landlord & -lady
a fly drowning inside it.
You tried to make me drink it all down
so as not to insult the hospitality of these fine people.
Even then you were a force to reckon with,
implement sometimes—the force—manage a little
but never rule:
years of applied technique
trial and error
most kinks
massaged out
with just enough residual weirdness
to keep things interesting
or a little surprise at breakfast: did she say that?
Hmmm, she’s still got it. 
We were twenty-something
back then. Didn’t know asses from elbows. But
so close to happy it couldn’t help but touch us.




Monday, May 1, 2017

Flashmob



 
Schrecksee 30 x 30 cm acryl/gouache on cotton rag paper by Karin Goeppert


HELLAS (1)

Nervous Greek toilet: delicate
as a maiden aunt’s
belly, hardly able
to keep anything down.
The plumber you sent for
several hours if not
days ago
lured into a card game
at the harbor
finally shows up
with a bag full of excuses
and a few old tools.
And he would say—if he bothered
to explain but certainly not justify
an existence as self-evident
and deserving as his own—
“I am what I am.”
As much Popeye as Zorba,
he scratches his seven day beard.
Almost scratches his balls
before noticing the presence of a female.
Thinks he knows exactly
how to extract what he wants
from what you have.
Your “secretary,” for example.
Turn your back for five seconds
he’s fingering her hemline,
admiring the “material,”
her hands in the air
flapping helplessly
as if trying to dry nail polish.
Human nature or whatever
you want to call it has room
here to stretch,
scratch a musky armpit, sigh,
reach across the table—
a rickety affair, beer coaster
stuck under one wobbly, too short leg—
and grab a few more olives.