The cowgirls and the great cowboy of Canterbury, painting the complicated ceiling at the cathedral, a watercolour in Chocolate Café and the inevitable old postcards of Ramsgate.

Around 50 years ago – have to appreciate I am not a local and my mum dfl’d to Ramsgate back then – I discovered the huge paintings of cows by Tom Sid Cooper the stately cowboy of Canters. To begin with I thought they were, what’s the word? Begins with R. Oh yes the pits. 

Anyway and I know this sounds stupid, when I was 16 I managed to escape from school and get a job as - for want of a better word - a scientist, in Canterbury and this meant I spent a lot of time there. This was the 60s so it think it reasonable to assume I have remembered this all wrong.

 Anyway one day when I was waiting around, probably for a computer to learn something I noticed this picture of Tom's tucked away in the corner, It's called "The Horse Thief" and somehow it manages to express something dodgy going on, not just in the man's expression but in the expression of the horse and the dog.  

Anyway the long and the sort of it was I had a closer look at Tom's pictures and found I suddenly liked his work a lot.

 This is a big picture of a cow

with this little picture in the corner.

big picture of cows

boats in the corner

same

cathedral and windmill if you look a bit more carefully 

anyway I saw this sign in Canterbury today and it reminded me to look at the cow pictures again.

On to the Cathedral

Paints and brushes balance on the next seat, the ceiling is a repetitive pattern which should be easy to remember during the instant between looking up at it and down on the paper, my brain, like a very old computer is having trouble learning.

  

I may add a bit more to today's attempt, my best shot so far

 Chocolate Cafe was very busy and I made do with the only seat I could get, the view from it was a bit restricted.

Here are the old pictures of Ramsgate