A quick sketch of the people in The Belgian Café this evening and a rant

There is one sort of sketching that requires people keeping still and lots of careful shading and tones, this is best done with soft pencils and lots of patience. There is another sort done where the people are constantly moving about, coming and going and getting in the way. I guess you can tell what sort of a sketch this one is, all I can say is you can only get better at it by doing it and frankly it is difficult to tell if progress is being made.

In a way there is something I want to capture about how people are when they are about socialising, something I want to capture about the way people look now which is different to how they looked at different times in the past.

The problems in Margate at the moment, the Portas one and a few others, which I will come to in a mo, are fairly difficult to understand form the outside, this time they seem to failing to spend the £100k grant they have received to try and sort the place out a bit.  

I did get the Gazette today and it seems have gone up to 70p I am pretty sure it has just gone up to 65p and this is cover there and on the Margate blogs.

I visited Margate on the last two Sundays and I guess these visits would have been similar to visits made by people who didn’t know the town very well, as my primary concern was with The Turner Contemporary.  

Both of these visits were far less satisfactory than the ones I made during last winter and I have only just realised that this is partly to do with the market in the old town not being there on a Sunday anymore. I guess it added more human interaction to the experience, whatever it is, its absence has made more difference than I expected.

I guess the exhibits in Turner Contemporary not working properly led to depressing thoughts about the gallery, £2m per year running costs, equipment far less complicated than that in Margate’s amusement arcades and a large proportion of it out of order.

The video the gallery put up on youtube the 4^th of this month about the exhibition has 91 views in 11 days whereas the one of Alan Poole doing his rendition of Animal Farm “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”  George Orwell has only been up since 12^th of this month i.e. 3 days and has had 235 views. Says it all really.     

 

This blog is suffering from another storm of unfortunate comment, one commenter posting a stream of obscenities relating to the royal family, another two posting libels about prominent local people all of this in something of a spam storm. My apologies to you if you have been subjected to any of this, I try to delete it as soon as I can.