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, November 12, 2017

The mountains, The mountains


The scary Climb 40 x 30 cm mixed media on paper





MOUNTAIN LOVE

What can you say about mountains?
That you can’t fit them into a phone? But, look, you can.
When I’m on top of one of
them I’m a little high because I’m short
of oxygen after the climb and take huge
gulps of air to compensate, a pulmonary phenomenon  
Brad Pitt coolly elucidates in “Fight Club.”  
I’m inspirationally
high…sometimes. Other times I’m somewhat numb, a little
detached, wondering what kind of beer I’ll have with
my schnitzel when we’re gemütlich and sleepy in town. And
I’m wondering but it’s no wonder they put cheese on everything
in the Gasthäuser; emmentaler, greyerzer; bells clanking
lethargically when the cows lick their muddy hides, their
tongues, great pink saliva laced slabs, reaching out, touching you,
like an old commercial for long distance phone calls.
Some of the higher peaks here look like
they’ve been in a fight, are gorgeously deformed.
Others have grass growing on steeply slanting faces, softening,
but still irredeemably aloof. They will not be walked upon.
Music to accompany these writhing piles of rock shouldn’t be Wagner
or Strauss. I would prefer the Miles Davis of “Kind of Blue”
or something tense but quiet by Charles Mingus. Water breathing   
out cold air as it falls; music so cool it almost can’t be bothered.




Sunday, November 5, 2017

Art and Poetry for several occasions



 
Maremma 40 x 50 cm ink/ashes on canvas




POEM FOR SEVERAL OCCASIONS

If only there was botox
for the brain. Unsightly bulges
and crevices flattened and filled. The limbic
system tightened up. No more hard feelings,
no jitterbugging hesitations. A constant cool front
moving in; you chill; you bop. Anything goes
and we’re loving it. Like writers who
are heartlessly literal: we call a
fish a fish. Squirming on the hook,
it’s still a fish, isn’t it?  
That’s life, as Sinatra sang. You bend over
to pick up a cheese burger and trigger a booby trap.
That was life.
Speaking of booby traps: touch a girl’s
knee, you’re out of a job. Then you remember
Nietzsche, what he wrote about the debilitating
effects of power on intelligence. Nailed that one.
No, life is a rum commercial in 1989. That’s what we want.
But who knows how many takes it took to get it right?
Anyone out there privy to that info?
When a very young whore, I mean young— so young
she reminds you of somebody’s baby sister
the night of her junior prom—staggers out
of her pimp’s Hummer, in Prague maybe
or Warsaw no less, she’s still a whore, isn’t she? Her bruises
are predictable, even banal. Still, you wince, you wince
and try to forget that you’re a bit of a softy after all; maybe  
have a sister somewhere. Still, this is the world. This is how
the world plays its game. But the red, that red,
no matter its—contextual relevance?—belongs inside.