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 26, 2013

Well, May might even be cooler than April. At least this year.

Schlehdorf 38,5 x 48,5 cm





CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE DREAM WE LIVE IN

April just might be the coolest month. Not cold, cool.
The new flowers are braving it,
hanging in there in loops and twirls
of color and fragrance, too young, too inex-
perienced to do anything else.
The Indian restaurant sending out signals of
curry, cumin, some kind of fried nut—no,
I don’t mean that poor soul swaying on the
corner in rainbow colored rubber boots, chanting
his own private liturgy — I mean an odor of Triple Hot Chicken
Vishnu spread eagled on a blanket of basmati rice
flowing into our noses. People are almost naked.
We’re out for a walk in the neighborhood, Kreuzberg,
Berlin, following a topography of punk, of anarchy, failed politics, or
rolling a big package to the post office, and people are
almost naked — pale as vampires, the girls, fashionably
depraved, seeking love and pleasure from the oddest sources,
from hipsters minus hips wearing no-ass pants, no less, with slack unexercised
bodies and big time B.O. — and now turning into the park on a Sunday  
morning, virtuously masochistic in sweats and running shoes, I see half
of Africa, a Diaspora gathered in this not quite leafy not quite  
sanctum and they’re waiting stoically for someone either to deport 
them or purchase their dubious product, which you can possess in 
moderate quantities, but cannot sell to anyone, a very unsatisfactory 
arrangement. I’m breathing hard by now, thinking about anything
but what I’m doing: a crazy middle-aged man in such obvious
respiratory distress that some smart-ass young guy walking by
in zero-butt skin-tight jeans and wearing a goddamn pork-pie hat  
offers to call an ambulance. Fuck you, I think, I feel, but don’t say
just puff onward, and onward seems endless. In Winter
when the path-
ways and miniature meadows were thick with snow
and while crunching up some man-made mini hill, I
encountered a silver fox. In the middle of a city of millions.
Not a symbol of whatever, I swear. Not a poetic devise. An actual silver fox
staring me down with curiosity unhampered
by bafflement or alarm, his bear-like fuzzy ears seeming to twitch
slightly, and no doubt wondering, if that’s the word, and with
all due respect to Pathetic Fallacy (animal version thereof), who I was running from. 






L'Apres-midi d'un Faune - Joffrey Ballet
Claude Debussy
Choreographie: Vaslav Nijinski
Faun: Rudolf Nurejev



Sunday, May 19, 2013

Sultry Things

Schwüler Nachmittag - Sultry Afternoon 39 x 39 cm






THE TRIUMPH OF REASON

The woman who runs the bar in this
Spanish village—a formidable
physical presence leaning into
her Formica counter—just might
have the evil eye. Or is that
a Sicilian novelty? Never mind.  
One look from her could silence the devil’s laughter,
could curdle the milk of human kindness
in a dairy run for the poor by very nice nuns.
I feel that I should immediately shield my
crotch or maybe scarf down a toe of garlic
quickly as possible or cross myself 
frantically while muttering   
imprecations as ancient as the vines,
as the olive trees in these hills are ancient. Instead,
as Voltaire and Diderot or Jefferson might have done,
I settle for a chilled out beer and some salted peanuts.





 John Lee Hooker - Annie Mae

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Mediterranean

Zypressen - Cypress Trees






MEDITERRANEAN WOMAN

You stumble out into the garden first thing
only to find a headless mouse
in the lumpy gravel.

Muchos  gracias, senor Gatto.

The Middle Sea ignores all things nocturnal,
lives in and for the light.

Back in the bungalow  (a retired
storage shed, olive oil and wine, cool)  your wife is preparing
her hangover for the other hangovers that she meets,  ie., yours.

The cock’s crowing has the deep throaty insistence
of a drill instructor on the first morning of boot camp.

More comforting and softly intrusive is the sound of Pedro’s  (Mexican
expatriate)  stacking (not even quietly) of branches and other vegetal
debris from the orchard for his once weekly bon fire—is
he raising sweet smoke for the benefit of an Aztec deity?

It’s not only the pungent richly veined cheeses
or deep red vintage aging intricately (aren’t we all,
more or less?)  in the cellars of a monastery, inspiring
someone to say, I was as shitfaced as a Spanish monk.

It’s not just you, in a slow sweat,
eating lamb in mustard sauce beneath the
thick leaves of a plane tree, watching the girls and women
come and go. It is also the stifling night without sleep.

It is also the Mediterranean woman—cutting through
the warm air like a mythic vessel
Cassandra
Medea
Iphigenia In Tauris
Maria Callas at the MET
Dominique Sanda in “1900”

Unreal.





1900
Dominique Sanda and Robert de Niro in a
film by Bernardo Bertolucci