Turner and the Elements at the Turner Contemporary a ramble

Today was my first visit to this exhibition and I suppose the notion of hanging the Turners grouped by the elements was one that I had some reservations about, having seen the exhibition my tentative opinion is that it works reasonably well.

The gallery was fairly busy, though not so busy that it prevented one from viewing the pictures, a very enjoyable aspect of this exhibition is that you can get right up close to the pictures, essential for the watercolours.

The elements that the pictures are grouped in are, earth, water, air, fire and fusion, in this instance fusion is meant to be a combination of all four.

There are various ways of doing this exhibition related to budget, we did this with some of my children, two ten year olds and my oldest (early twenties) daughter and her partner. So we mitigated the cost of eating and parking, drove to Westgate seafront and ate lunch at The West Bay Café.

This is very good value and being on the promenade makes it an easy one with children if you take skates, scooters or some other digestive aid.

Here are the pictures of Westgate today http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop112/id13.htm

A light lunch including drinks for all of us at The West Bay Café was under £20.

Parking on the road next to it is free and there are usually plenty of spaces.

On to parking on the Dreamland site, this cost £1.50 for four hours, there are usually plenty of spaces here, parking closer to the Turner Contemporary can often be expensive or limited to two hours, unless you want to pay for all day.

Then on to take advantage of Margate’s rather sad High Street, this time to buy some really cool shoes for one of my children in the closing sown sale of a shoe shop.

Here is the link to the next batch of pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop112/id14.htm

Occupy Thanet are occupying a bit of pavement outside the Turner Contemporary, some comment about this here http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2012/01/occupy-thanet-to-hold-event-in-margate.html I found it interesting to talk to the protesters and in some way it adds to the interest of visiting the exhibition. Camping there in January has much to do with the elements and if I didn’t have other commitments I would like to have joined them for a day or so to better understand their concerns.

It isn’t allowed to photograph the exhibition so I didn’t here are the next lot of pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop112/id15.htm  

As I have said before the only window in the gallery facing the right way is in the restaurant and I went there to watch the sunset over a cup of tea, after some amount of psyching myself up I had a go at a watercolour. The sunset was moving quickly and this was paint straight onto wet paper, it didn’t come out very well but after seeing the turners I had to get hold of a brush.

The sunset pretty much stops play there as people line the window with their phones to photograph it.

Having failed with the watercolour I then proceeded to take some pictures in the dark, here they are http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop112/id16.htm

I will ramble on here this evening adding text and images as I feel inclined.