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 16, 2020

Just the two of us

Just the two of us - acrylic on canvas - 120 x 120 x 2 cm (47.24 x 47.24 x 0.78 in) c/o Karin Goeppert





PACKAGE TOUR

Another warm 
day in Sorrento
a couple of decades ago.
Followed by another. There were precisely
fourteen in total. Slow days
of alcoholic contemplation, out by the pool
drinking Tears of Christ, the cheapest
wine available, grapes grown on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Maybe a thousand
olive trees, I wouldn’t lie. And a Roman
bath with squirting phallic graffiti
all over its ruined walls. “Italians,”
my wife said, “apparently really love dick.”
We began to see cocks everywhere—in chalk
on brick walls, spray painted, even in
what seemed to be toothpaste—
Amalfi, Positano, later in Naples. Such over
compensation understandable
perhaps in a psychic matriarchy, the realm of Mama Mia.

“Despised and rejected,”
said the Dutch art
historian—quoting from Handel’s Messiah—
a reluctantly gay man
recently dumped by a long-time lover;
embarrassed by his life
he couldn’t stop talking about it.
We travelled over to Ravello
with him one day—he gleefully
clapping his hands, hoping we’d
bump into Gore Vidal
buying tomatoes and prosciutto crudo—
where he downed three beers
in thirty-minutes flat
then wobbled off to the bus
and waited for us there. Sadness
nearly geographic in its magnitude.
Death Valley, the Empty Quarter.
We knew him precisely fourteen days.
Breakfast and dinner included.  With a partial sea view.