Saturday 7 January 2017

The rudeness of painters a reflection on painting in Canterbury Cathedral and a few old Thanet pictures.

January, not the best month to paint in the uk, it’s the time that it’s just about light enough during the day mostly but too cold to paint outside. Painting from cafés is all very well but the big magnet that attracts me locally is the inside of Canterbury Cathedral.


This in my nth attempt at the nave, this type of internal perspective slowly improves with practice, and getting this attempt finished today, well it really just means starting again and hoping the next one will be better.

Over the next few years there is going to be a lot of building work going on in the cathedral so I am not sure what impact this will have on painting inside it.


The other one started today was a first go at paining the cathedral crypt, I had a go at the bit with the medieval frescos, you aren’t allowed to take photos in the crypt so you will just have to take my word that this first attempt is not very good.

Anyway well the rudeness bit, not so very much my fault, the cathedral – you see is rather noisy, lots of people in a stone building without carpets and soft furniture to soak the sound up. This means I paint with earplugs in, I have considered headphones but am not really sure what you are allowed to do in churches, I have also considered painting during services. The crypt is supposed to be silent, believe me when I say you don’t know the half of it, so to the people who spoke to me today while I was painting in the cathedral to whom I replied, “sorry I have earplugs in and can’t hear you” should I apologise?


Time out of the Cathedral in Canterbury today I painted this one from Chocolate Café, a very quick sketch.



  a photo for potential critics

The bookshop is still very much in local history mode, here is the link to the pictures of the books that went out today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/a-fine-place-to-daydream-in-bookshop.html

Next some old Thanet pictures 



No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.