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, August 26, 2018

Going Underground


 
Paradise Lost 100 x 100 cm acrylic on paper





GOING UNDERGROUND

                                                                      Now I am quietly waiting for
                                                                      the catastrophe of my personality
                                                                      to seem beautiful again….
                                                                                       Frank O’ Hara


How long have you been taking time off?
Love the outfit: way too tight Led Zep t-shirt,
garden clogs with air-holes, those
radically frayed hand-me-down cargo shorts….

No need to even the score or seize the upper hand. Who’s
keeping track? Certainly not your drinking buddies, currently busy
sprinkling hash over tobacco. The ultra-skinny old dude
with Jimmy Page hair? He’s ordering vodka shots. Sometimes life is  

entrepreneurial (whispers an inner-voice) waiting in its shop-front window,
a sex-worker in Amsterdam; other times a Vermeer girl off in a
shadow, double-checking her shopping list. Meaning? Mean-
while outside of your skin it is spring, so why not stand barefoot

on sun-warmed carpets? Strip clothes off, go walking—
more or less in that order—and surprise the neighborhood—not
the first time a master of your own disaster: Old Hippie
Let’s it All Hang Out Yet Again, shared on Facebook and thousands “like” it.





Sunday, August 19, 2018

RESPECT




Harbinger 100 x 120 x 1.5 cm acrylic on canvas



TUSCAN ORDEAL

Netherlandish neo-pagans come here for
the Madagascar Hoopoe, a striped bird
with an umber head that looks like a helmet, and  
a long thin beak. It doesn’t sing or moan or whistle—
it shrieks as if someone has pissed it off.

The first time I heard one I thought some
Netflix spawned man-eating
creature had crawled up
to the side yard of our rented house:

rows of vines, olive trees flickering from white to pale dusty  
plush green. Then back.  Productive landscape, food factory.

Peasants must think we are nuts to come here
and watch them work. I try to picture leathery
farm hands with big white teeth pulling up in a tour bus
in front of a manufacturing facility, a chip-building campus
clutching meal tickets and smart phones. That’s us, in reverse.

Warm grass blades pricking my bare feet.  Late afternoon
and I’m in pajamas, sipping, I kid you not, a G&T.  Across the street
are three farm workers taking a break beneath a massive cherry tree,

observing a dork in his jammies at five PM. They’re intimidatingly
detached about it all. To add insult, two Madagascar Hoopoes
shriek from a shared tree limb. A blond woman in very short shorts
jogs by.  Doing what workers everywhere would do
each man gives his crotch a subconscious squeeze,
sending signals from his literal lap top. I have another sip.

In five days I’ll be teaching the gerund.
The present perfect progressive.
In five months I’ll know for sure I can’t go on.
This is known as the grammar of small despair. 



Sunday, August 12, 2018

Some poems, art and music




Creek 120 x 100 x 1.5 cm acrylic on canvas




SOME POEMS

Ludwig Van Beethoven
once told a prince he was merely
a prince while he Beethoven was Beethoven, i.e.,
far superior to an aristocrat
what was that all about
I don’t know
he was rather self-conscious about his forehead
his “massive brow” the way it bulged
into everybody’s social space
which is about three feet in California
a foot and a half in New York City
doesn’t exist at all in Germany
people in your face
they don’t even know it
suddenly nose to nose and wondering why
why don’t we just move on

never thought I’d find you here
lost and found
waiting for someone to claim
you
is that a pun
a trope some people will say is “bad”
then why do they laugh
are there “good” puns
or “average”
markets tell us energy’s in decline
irrational exuberance
has taken a couple of weeks off
don’t put that in your mouth, honey
it’s so quiet out there     how do you pun on silence
what is the proper response to such a pun
a measured, ambiguous chuckle
you can keep the change
you can change for keeps
if I say another word ( measured, ambiguous smile)
I’ll kill you

Old Masters were the best
but would they win the superstar contests
think of what
was endured
plague      wars on front door steps
dreadful dearth of deodorant      thank
fully unfinished symphonies
the whole world was third
not just the part with diamond mines
or super cheap labor in it
identity issues     am I Stalinist or Trotskyite      Frank O’
Hara said de Kooning and Pollack were not mutually exclusive
Americans          hard
isolate     stoic        killers      according to
D. H. Lawrence
who actually slipped his mum an OD of morphine in a glass of warm milk
She was dying of cancer     in terrible pain
some things were easier back then
unspoken humane things

do you ever think about
the relationship between line
break and syntax
oh yeah        all the time      you wanna hand me that beer
Michaelangelo was an OM who rarely removed his boots
papal assistants
clothes pins pinching
their nostrils
hoisted him up to the Sistine ceiling
its holy images of sweat sauce over cubes
of beefcake on wet plaster
lightly sprinkled with powdered steroids        which wine
would you recommend       oh one of those muscular reds from the south

I don’t know who said we are less violent now than before
before what
I would gladly trade my second hand
International Harvester for a vintage panzer
which
in obscure German dialect
means dildo
don’t put that in your mouth, schatz        people
somewhat inbred
interesting physical deformities
ears that might have
made an elephant preen
food good if simple and the beer
did I mention the beer          it hasn’t
stopped raining since 1972
was Karl the Great “Charlemagne”      was that even legal
back then
King John saw fit to repent
repeat after me
if you eat water melon seeds you will not      I repeat    will not
not die of cancer
depends on what you do with it, Schatz, not how big it is     Dankeschön