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, June 26, 2016

Three Fates



 
Nigella 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas




THREE FATES

A woman speaks French
to her husband then slaps his face.

He understands nothing. How do you reason
with hurricanes, the fury of natural calamity?

Their three sons grow up strange in a handful
of provincial cities. They move out. One is

barely employed; a stalled novelist who keeps writing
or half-writing the same story: a large

peasant woman in garden clogs storms into a rustic kitchen
angry about something no male in the family can fathom.

Soup dribbles down Papa’s unshaven chin, he stutters—
and that’s as far as it goes. A novel about inarticulate fear?

The occasional obscurity of rage? Okay, his girlfriend asks,
what about the plot, conflict, point of fucking view? WHAT

HAPPENS ON PAGE TWO, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE? His brother Marcel,
a flamenco artiste at a casino in Atlantic City, is secretly

vain about his ass; Jean, the third and youngest brother, is a
pipe fitter in Toledo, Spain, and has backed into a passion

for gothic cathedrals, wondering what plumbing was like back then.
One day they return home to mother, whose hand’s still aching

from twenty-years back, her French as opaque as ever. On the occasion 
of her death she leaves each of her sons an extremely long, gorgeous

knitted scarf, her life’s work. They wear the scarves
everywhere. Until they start to choke. Then they understand. 





Sunday, June 5, 2016

Land of Hope and Glory



 
Burst 60 x 50 cm mixed media on canvas board by Karin Goeppert


THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE….

The Speaker of the House
knows whereof he speaks. Trim
the hedges, says the Speaker, scrub
the floor boards, shine your shoes. There
is no order in the heart, says the Speaker.

The pursuit of happiness is fraught with discontent.
Can’t-get-enough appetite keeps coming back: says
the Speaker: Eros or Thanatos? The Speaker
prefers Eros, yet even the famously amorous French
signify orgasm as “petite mort,” making
post-coital melancholy a version of the afterlife.

Ungovernable tempers are attempting to form
a government, announces the Speaker.  “Order!... I said
Order!” (the man frequently quotes himself). There
is no order in the heart, says the Speaker, toking
on a Thai-stick with one hand, sipping smoky whiskey
from the Isle of Islay with the other.

The heart knows no order, says the Speaker
to his jock-strapped super-stud lover; just make sure
you walk the dog and feed the cat. Sniff the cork first
then taste the claret. Take care of little things,
they more or less take care of you. As it were. So to speak.