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, March 23, 2014

Back to the Garden

Der Garten - The Garden 39 x 25 cm Acryl/Pastel on wood




ADAM AND EVE IN BERKELEY

Climbing under the blanket
on the back lawn, more or less
in our underwear, was not
a gesture of defiance designed to
annoy alarm or disgust
the neighborhood zombies—
I prefer to label it
maturity put on layaway. For a long time.
It’s still there, I think, feathered in dust, moldering
on a rusty shelf with microwaves and crystal balls.
Then there was Animush, meaning either
“peace pipe” or “war path” in Apache,
German shepherd
mixed with some other breed
manic with celebration, dancing around
the Incredible Moving Blanket while a mega spider
its puffy partially collapsed beer belly
the color of a soiled cotton ball
loomed weirdly in its broken web—a noticeably decadent
monster, like a character in top hat out of Huysman or Proust
                  cruising the Moulin Rouge
feasting on young girls from the provinces
just as we feasted on tomatoes & cucumbers
fresh from Denny’s garden and coated in
oil of sassafras, Italian vinegar, or lemon juice.
I think I was reading an introduction
to the Eros of Art or was it the Art of Eros
and you were reading the Palm of God,
sighing all the way through, astonished by its size,
its deep crevice of solitude.



 

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Woodstock

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Swamped

California on my Mind I 35 x 33 cm






BAYOU

You can’t imagine how long it took me
to find out that life is not a French movie  
in which the characters are precisely elliptical

in that Gaullic fashion we once thought
so witty and admirable, everywhere reeking
of cigarette smoke and of easy-

going sex and good strong coffee, it’s never
that frivolous, a difficult or dangerous situation
might surface that requires grace under pressure,

calm, focus, stealth, and even
cunning if that’s what fits,
even a kind of Machiavellian

twist to the plot—a move like that of Michael’s
in the “Godfather,” or Peter O’Toole’s King Henry
in the “Lion In Winter.” I’ve seen too many movies

because most of the time life is more 
like a documentary on PBS
about the unfortunates who live in a trailer park

lost down some ignoble rural route  
in the deep-fried South, and where it occurs
to a stand-up philosopher one Sunday evening

at a roadhouse adjacent a stinking swamp
that our freedom is nothing but an illusion,
is some other guy’s story in the end, an amiable

asshole, surely, but one with a lot more re-     
sources and pull than we will ever have, in fact   
he’s doing the Machiavellian twist

right now with the lap dancer we’d hoped—
stupidly, expensively— to spend the night with.
Meanwhile management is washing its

hands of us, and we find ourselves    
lodged between a pair of moo-moos in house-slippers
who in a certain light resemble the bloated remnants

of Thelma and Louise. Floral and huge
as a twin-set of rain soaked sofas 
on some sagging back porch in Baton Rouge

they dream of day-time soaps and the cunning smiles of evening anchors. 




Born on the Bayou

Sunday, March 9, 2014

California on my Mind

California on my Mind No. II 35 x 33 cm





WAITING IN LINE  

We’re having baby potatoes sprinkled with rosemary
 and thickened with cheese,
   broad beans and a kebab
invention, minus skewers, which are thought hazardous
   in our violent household.
That’s not true. We’re having beef burgers from Jolly’s
   they’re only fifteen-cents each
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is how the poor survive in America,
   a nose for the good deal,
a taste for bad food, solid stoic pioneer staying power
   making it less difficult to stand in line
   an hour for the pleasure of ordering ten beef four regular
fries one onion rings strawberry shake three cokes to go. You made friends
   in those lines, talked Giants Dodgers 49ers
   Buster Mathis beating the crap
   out of George Chuvalo on TV last night. Nureyev
   guest-dancing at the Frisco Ballet
wasn’t brought up by anyone, out of ignorance,
   out of indifference.
   Politics? No good news there, and yet

how I long for the year of Watergate. At least there was something
   interesting on TV. I’d cut school just to watch senator
Sam Erwin grill H.R. Haldeman, also known as “Bob”
   who’d let his crew-cut grow out
so he looked gentle and sleepy-eyed, and so soft-spoken you’d
never have known he’d once been King Richard’s Sturmführer 
and was not a nice guy in an apron most days, broom in hand,
   proud proprietor of the general store on Main Street
squint-eying your fifteen year old daughter semi-dressed in short-shorts
and then after him was Bob’s colleague big John Erlichman, which in German  
   means “honest man,” an irony almost
gross in its obviousness, or the preternaturally
tedious John Dean
with his overwhelming fear of being raped in prison
and whose wife’s hairdo was a masterpiece of sculpted platinum.
   She looked like a very sad Athena.
   What would a reunion be like? Bob
Haldeman, the two Johns, the Hairdo, and even Dick and Pat and Trish and
   the totally unmemorable  
David Eisenhauer(Trish’s squeeze), all of us lined up at Jolly’s, waiting our turn,
trying to think of something to say the others might understand.
   A few of us (ill-bred,
indiscreet, semi-rural suburbanites) might even ask those—those who
   qualified—what it was like being dead.




Romeo and Juliet, ballet by Kenneth McMillan
with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev
Music Sergej Prokofiev


Sunday, March 2, 2014

Paradise Revisited

untitled trees 38,5 x 28,5 cm oil sticks and oil pastels

Und ich experimentiere weiter mit meinen Ölfarben. Ich finde es wirklich gut, dass die Ölfarben und die Ölpastelle kompatibel sind - wenn man die Geduld hat zu warten bis das Öl einigermaßen trocken ist.

I keep experimenting with my oil colors. It is great that the oil sticks and the oil pastels are compatible - if you find the patience to wait for a while until the oil is more or less dry.


A "paradise" that was once our home - San Francisco c/o Karin Goeppert



Our most recent "paradise": Berlin-Kreuzberg c/o Karin Goeppert



HOTEL PARADISE

From a window in paradise you see an elegant girl
running into the courtyard. Three elephants and their
white garbed handler soon follow. There is no sense of danger
but it is crowded. Ignoring the others—the bowlers, the fat
lady about to sing—she walks over to the marble well and
putting face into hands starts to cry. You feel it must be
the mediocrity of life—obtuse, tacky, badly lit
day time TV life—that’s making her sad. But then what is  
the upside? A cantata sung in Leipzig perhaps. A Tuscan landscape.
How about crème brulet served by a bewitching angel? For some people    
uncomplicated couplings in culs-de-sac do the trick. Just look upwards,
amigo, this season the girls are very tall indeed. Angelic witches. They look
right through you. No wonder you are under water half the time, 
scrubbing obsessively, trying to get that smell of need off your skin.






 Hotel California - The Eagles