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, September 8, 2019

In Matters of Taste we are not Equal



Summerpond 120 x 100 x 1.8 cm - acrylic on canvas




IN MATTERS OF TASTE WE ARE NOT EQUAL

Amid the rubbish a storm 
has discarded in the gun
turret of some plump 
burgher’s suburban vehicle
is a piece of kitsch—an awful curtain
or is it a bed spread?
Who owned this stuff?
And why did they have
the bad luck (not “bad taste”)
to get caught up in
one of History’s shit storms,
plague, marauding armies, nuclear melt down?
Some disasters are made to sound
cute. Hurricane “Suzy,” say, or “Tina”
chaos in red boots and a short skirt
comes to mind
and tsunami sounds like
a delicate piece of fish
fashioned by elegant Asian
fingers into something tasty  
and, even more important,
trendy.
But it feels bad,
it feels like food
poisoning on the Monday
morning you’ve been fired
it feels like an evil verdict  
from the witch doctor-in-chief
the array of nauseating
treatments he’s lined up just for you.
It’s not easy to remain
fastidious when blood stains
on bullet-pocked rubble
are just beginning to fade. Still,
there’s no way I’m going to buy  
that moth-ravaged wall hanging
in the Sarajevo flea market. Not merely ugly,
the damn thing has got to be haunted.