Pat Worsfold at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

The current Exhibition  is by Thanet  Artist Pat Worsfold A retrospective collection of Watercolours and Oil Paintings by Pat. The exhibition runs -    25th Feb - 4th Mar Exhibitions change weekly on Wednesdays.

Laurence Chandler at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

The current Exhibition  is by Ramsgate based Artist Laurence Chandler A collection of Abstract Seascape Paintings inspired by the Thanet Coastline. The exhibition runs -    18th Feb - 25th Feb Exhibitions change weekly on Wednesdays.

Petticoat Lane Emporium Ramsgate where I buy a bookbinding press for my bookshop and take a few photos for those of you who haven’t visited it yet.

My bookshop in Ramsgate being closed today I went off to have a look at Ramsgate’s latest retail extravaganza, one great advantage to this one is that if you have children it is very close to King George VI Park, so entertainment for all the family.

Here is the link to The Petticoat Lane Emporium website http://www.petticoatemporium.com/ in terms of an all weather, seven days a week, something to do in Thanet, with loos and a café, I would have thought most people would want to stay for an hour or two.   

Here are the photos which should expand if you click on them

I bought the book press below for £35, which I thought was good value.

Alan & Mara Longley at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

The current Exhibition  is by Alan & Mara Longley A collection of Abstract, Quilting, Paintings The exhibition runs -   11th Feb - 18th Feb Exhibitions change weekly on Wednesday

Light lunch at Isaura’s in Deal, a few books for my bookshop, a quick sketch and some thoughts about art

The progress of drawing either requires a pencil, rubber, a lot of patience combined with much concentration on vanishing points light directions and shading, or if you go at it like me with a pen in hurry. 

You can see from today’s sketch that there should have been a vanishing point over to the left of the picture at seated eye height and most of the lines going roughly from left to right should have met there, e.g. the line at the bottom of the glass in the door should have been up on the right and down on the left, the shelf over the window on the tight should have progressed from the one on the left and been wider and so on.

Fortunately I photographed it for comparison, but there is another side to this coin, sketching freehand in ink and putting all of the geometry to one side, which is a bit like, the business with the monkey and the typewriter.

That is that yes given an infinity of time a monkey with a typewriter will eventually write the works of Shakespeare and it also follows that the same monkey will also write something as good as Shakespeare but different.

Anyway a few times recently, although possibly not in this one a couplet has seemed to pop out.

Anyway the light lunch at Isaura’s a useful discovery this, and I have just checked and Trip Advisor concurs see http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g503900-d5430154-Reviews-Isaura_s_Fine_Food-Deal_Kent_England.html#REVIEWS

Here are the books we bought on the way round Deal, I couldn’t resist the Leggo Bible, Lolita for some reason as a favourite with foreign students, I never have enough on military transport to the Jeep book was a good find, and two Shire Albums, something I am selling more than I am buying at the moment. 

On the local news front, fortunately it looks like the asset disposal of Pierremont Hall Broadstairs is going to go through with Broadstairs Town Council’s bid for it as a community asset likely to be accepted. Of course the snag here is Ramsgate as ever the poor relation doesn’t really have a public building of a size related to the size of Ramsgate as TDC have sold them all off to the private sector.         

The council’s brave new plans for Ramsgate. What’s the snag? Hornby Hobbies off to Discovery Park and possibly a ramble.

There are always snags with either administration at TDC, I guess one of the greatest problems that the previous Labour administration caused for Ramsgate was the wonderful coloured concrete promenade in front of the Pleasurama debacle.

Of course it looked marvellous on paper, but it did remove pretty much all of the seafront parking in one swoop damaging Ramsgate’s tourist economy immeasurably and as it wasn’t attached to the chalk bedrock but sits on lose sand it also fails to act a as a sea defence there, however it did use up the grant funding.

Of course had some other administration been in power the money would have undoubtedly been spent in Margate.

Subsequently Ramsgate was pretty much left to its own devices under the Conservatives and two very beneficial things occurred. One being the café culture along Harbour Parade, the other being the emergence of a food shopping centre based around Staffordshire Street car park. Ramsgate has 3 butchers, 2 greengrocers and 2 bakers, of course on paper this should be occurring around the Leopold Street multi-storey car park, the problem here is most of the women who do most of the food shopping won’t go anywhere near it.

Anyway the council have put Staffordshire Street car park out to tender for development, here is the link http://thanet.gov.uk/publications/properties/staffordshire-street-ramsgate/ I imagine like the large shop the council have recently bought in King Street the idea will be social housing.

There are also new plans for the seafront car park

Not sure about these, but am cautious about plans for Ramsgate Seafront.

Here is the article about the Hornby Hobbies move http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Hornby-Hobbies-quit-Margate/story-25998183-detail/story.html frankly I am surprised this they didn’t move from this site when they transferred manufacturing to China thirty years or more ago.

You don’t need a factory to make toy trains in, if you are no longer making them.

“Are you being served?” UKIP to get a bigger shop in Ramsgate, Lord Ashcroft and the Polls-up, and still time to have a punt on Scobie Do, Radar at Manston and other ramblings

There seems to be a bit of retail competition amongst the political parties in Ramsgate, first Labour open up a substantial shop overlooking the harbour which appears to be selling Will Scobie and now UKIP seem to be working up to a shop at each end of King Street, which presumably will be selling Nigel Farage. I am waiting with interest to see what the response to this will be from the other parties, will the Conservatives counter with a small supermarket selling Craig Mackinlay, will the Greens open up between the two greengrocers, or perhaps all the smaller political parties will club together for an indoor market, will Al Murray open a pub?    

There seems to have seems a bit of a mix up with the polls and the corrected results look like this http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2015/02/sheffield-hallam-doncaster-north-thanet-south/#more-7536 anyway in view of the polls showing CON 33%, UKIP 32%, LAB 26%, LIB DEM 4%, GRN 3% and with Ladbrokes offering UKIP 4/7 Conservatives 2/1 Labour 8/1 The Pub Landlord 66/1 Liberal Democrats 100/1 Greens 200/1 it may be time to have a bit of a flutter.

If you support UKIP or the Conservatives I particularly recommend putting £100 on Labour as if Will Scobie wins you will win £800 and won’t feel so bad about it.

Anyway I mentioned all this the other day and now it seems the reason is out and it won’t be long before bookies catch up with the polls.

The word on the street is that Nigel Ferage said at a book signing the other day in Broadstairs Pav that he wouldn’t be moving to Thanet if he won, but would leave the constancy in the hands of the UKIP councillors.

A shelf is a long way in politics, perhaps he intends to run Thanet South from his shop, with book signing sessions to compete with my bookshop. 

My take on this is that not everyone would want to deal with their MP via the old guard of the North Thanet Tories.  

The last of the Manston radars is to go see https://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/InformationNotice2014159.pdf this is the one on The Northern Grass and does open the way for development there, before there would have been a nominal chance of being microwaved.

The Northern Grass is the part of the airport site that hasn’t been used for years (the bit on the other side of the road that used to have the barriers at each end in R.A.F. days. Various airport operators had plans for mixed developments there but they never got off the ground. 

There has been another whole raft of documents submitted to the transport committee that relate to Manston published today and I have added the links to them to this post:

• TG Aviation Limited - written evidence | PDF version (48 KB) SMA0073 09 February 2015
• RiverOak Investment Corp., LLC - written evidence | PDF version (229 KB) SMA0075 09 February 2015
• Coastal Airports (Holdings Limited) - written evidence | PDF version (63 KB) SMA0076 09 February 2015
• Finlays Horticulture Investments Ltd - written evidence | PDF version (48 KB) SMA0077 09 February 2015
• Supporters of Manston Airport - written evidence | PDF version (79 KB) SMA0081 09 February 2015
• Stuart Vint - written evidence | PDF version (28 KB) SMA0085 09 February 2015

  

I have been working away on the art front, with a general movement towards making the people in my local sketches recognisable. I think the next stage is to introduce some colour, as you see the initial results are not so good.  

Well apart from, did you overdo the sunray lamp? And by way of explanation, at the moment I am doing virtually all of my sketches in pen, this is a XS size Pitt pen, basically a very fine indelible black felt tip. The main idea of this is to give me no way back because obviously it can’t be rubbed out. This fits very well with the limited amount of time I get sketching out and about, it also doesn’t smudge and the end results seem to photograph better than pencil does for publishing online.

I have been doing a fair amount of practice sketching from photos, which isn’t ideal, but seems to be working in the right direction. I am now finding that if I have been with the – for want of a better word victims – and have taken a few photos of them, providing there isn’t too much of a time lapse, I am beginning to be able to strike a reasonable likeness with head sizes in the 1p to 2p coin size range. Victim feedback has been encouraging, and I am starting to look towards colour. You would think that having sketched a face in pen, dotting the eyes the right colour doing the lips red and going over the rest with pink while trying to miss the eyeballs would suffice, but this doesn’t seem to be the case and there is a considerable amount of blue involved. Looking a the veins on the back of my hand, which are bluish and considering that blood is red I can see there is a lot to learn.