Quex House pen and watercolour sketch and some photos of the gardens.

This sketch of Quex House at Birchington in Thanet was an attempt to capture. What? I think it’s something like a glimpse through time. I don’t think this sort of thing works unless you work very quickly, the whole thing took less than an hour, like being in a trance. Perhaps something haunting but not spooky, anyway hopefully not something that can be captured with the camera.

Here is a photo in of the view.

Here are the photos of the gardens, the family entrance for today would have been £24, but was £18 because the house was closed for some of the time for a wedding. Using gift aid, which in practice means telling them your name, postcode and house number means that this covers family entrance for the following 12 months. Yep that’s it house, gardens and museum, as many times as you want for a year.

Chris Milham at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

 The current Exhibition is by  Chris Milham, Chris is a member of Acol Art Group and paints in Watercolour and Oil. The exhibition runs -  27th August - 3rd September

A few tenuous fragments of words and pictures from the bookshop in Ramsgate.

I haven’t got very much done on the art front over the last week or so, this is primarily because of the school holidays, trying to teach my own children the rudiments of music and drawing has taken up most of my spare time. And then the change in the weather, particularly the temperature of the early mornings before my bookshop opens has pretty much snookered me.

This morning was different, warm and sunny and I got a bit more done to the sketch I started a week ago Sunday.

The rest have been fragments sketched in-between shopping, but nothing much finished apart from indoor ones. The schools go back in about a week and I should have a lot more time.   

There really are very few largish independent bookshops of any type left in the UK, my definition of largish being large enough to lose yourself in physically and mentally and my definition of an independent bookshop being somewhere that is of most use to the people who either read a fair bit of fiction, or have an interest in something to the point that they buy books about it.

Useful and interesting as they are, the specialist bookshops and those where pretty much all of the books are aimed at book collectors are something else altogether.

My focus on my bookshop over the last few weeks has been the children’s section, the primary objective here is and always has been, to have a children’s section aimed at children and not adult collectors of children’s books. The main objectives being that it contains books that children want to read and that children can afford, having expanded the children’s section I have been working on the décor and seem to be going in the right direction.

Anyway I have been expanding the children’s section, taking the proportion of space allocated to children’s books well beyond the proportion of overall book sales, interestingly the amount of children’s book sales has increased roughly proportionately to the extra space.

If that didn’t make much sense, a simplified version goes something like this, there isn’t much profit to be made out of an independent bookshop, but what the hell, if you are going to have one you may as well do your best.   

I eventually wound up back at Westwood Cross this evening outnumbered by 6 members of the female persuasion and as I failed my shopping exam and am not allowed to partake I managed to almost finish of this pen and watercolour.

The star pavement that floated away in the picture I am afraid to say is barely visible in the photo.