Review with photos of the Christopher Alexander Exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Painting and drawing in Ramsgate and Margate, from The Oak Hotel Ramsgate, The Sands Hotel Margate and Bentley's Margate

Here are the photos of the Christopher Alexander Exhibition and my thoughts.

 This is the one that inspired me so much on Thursday that I got diverted into sketching the same building and forgot to take the photos.

 This view is up near the school for the deaf in Margate, the building on the left is still there and the one on the right isn't.

 something a bit Renoirish about the middle sketch in particular

 Margate pier destroyed in the 1970s by a storm

 Margate Sun Deck

 Note the lighthouse, more on this later in the post

 Margate old town

 Self portrait of Christopher Alexander, I think

Margate Old Town, the lamp gone, most of the rest is still there I think.

OK a go at a review of sorts, this painting, drawing, sketching, is something I try to do, rather badly and Christopher Alexander did rather well, I think.

The logistics of this sort of work around this area is so complex that it brings you much closer to even the great artists, if you go out painting and drawing. There is getting the weather right, finding a spot in the shade with the light behind you and if there is much wind it’s not good in your face. There is the seagull problem, drunks and so on the negative side. The interaction with other people which is a bit variable but mostly good, the karma that goes into the artwork perhaps.

Christopher Alexander is very much an artist of national acclaim painting and drawing the area around the gallery in Margate, so that you can go and look at some of the things that he painted drew, the views are still there and what has gone adds to the significance of the pictures.

Juxtapositioned against the Greyson Perry exhibition, which I think is the busiest one Turner Contemporary has ever had, I would say that it is well worth travelling a distance to the gallery to see what’s on there at the moment.

The descriptions of the pictures are mine and entirely relate to memories and what other people had to say, I haven’t done any research so there may be errors.

There will also be connections in this next bit which is illustrated with some of my painting and drawing done this week.   

My take here is there is only so much you can do with visual art in terms of either or review or criticism, before you have to move into your own visual art albeit not very good, it is in these terms that the rest of this post is also part of the review.  

I started painting at about 6 am at The Oak Hotel Ramsgate, a cup of coffee there and made a bit more progress with the watercolour painting I have been putting together from there before work during this week.

 Obviously I am not a commercial artist painting to sell pictures, this painting of Ramsgate illustrates this very well I think, as one of the main buildings in the picture, I think it was called The Royal Sailors Rest. When I first knew it was it was Ramsgate’s main ship chandler, when I went there as a boy, having bought a very ancient dingy that needed rope to rig it, the two gentlemen there closed their shop and helped me with the rigging, not something one forgets. Oh sorry rambling a bit here. This building which is wrapped up in scaffolding at the moment, so it isn’t in the picture and I assume commercially its inclusion would be a selling point. In practice scaffolding poles are much more difficult to paint because they are so thin.

So the only reason I get up at 5am in the summer and go painting and drawing is because I enjoy doing it, with the Christopher Alexander Exhibition there is for me a powerful sense of him enjoying painting and drawing.

While on the subject of this painting, I am getting fatter, so have had to drop breakfast and because I have children, where other meals are social occasions, so they learn not to eat their peas with a knife, it’s a shame really.

I used to be able to eat unhealthy food and stay thin, back in the time when bookselling was reasonably profitable my favoured restaurant  was Roules, when I didn’t eat at the club, the club charter booksellers used was ROSL and they aren’t stingy with the portions either.

Oh yes I can’t stress the how courteous and accommodating the staff and patrons of The Oak Hotel have been on the mornings of this week, while I only buy coffee and get this seat with such a fine view of Ramsgate.  

It was an inconvenient seagull this morning, missed the painting by inches but got my shirt and they immediately appeared with equipment to deal with the result of a very inconvenient seagull.

Anyway the rain clouds appeared and I went on to take the photos of the Christopher Alexander Exhibition, so I could write or possibly paint about it. By the time I had driven to Margate the sun was blazing down.

Here is the picture of Margate Museum that going to the Christopher Alexander Exhibition on Thursday inspired, but the distraction of sitting in The Cupcake Café painting the picture caused me to forget to go back and take the photos.

Having done this and enjoyed the exhibition again, I was inspired to draw Margate again, and this time it was the ferris wheel I wanted to to draw, but in a way that it has a recognisable bit of Margate in the drawing too.

To do this I had to find a seat, in the shade, with the sun not glaring into my eyes, ah reader I do hope you are binging to understand the complexity of the daubers doings.

I decided after a perambulation, that it would have to be the clock tower, here is the view.

Sorry about the picture, waving your mobile phone over your head and using the cropped result is an inexact science.

As you see the balcony of The Sands Hotel was where I needed to be, so off I toddled and armed with wonderfully cool Coca Cola on the balcony there, I started to draw this. 

The clock tower is fairly easy, but getting the Ferris wheel roundish was much more luck than judgement, so I hoped to finish this one over lunch, when alas tragedy struck. The sun rose over The Sands Hotel, my head being the first target, there is no shade there and the boiling brain having bent the final spoke, snapped me out of the mesmerised state caused by drawing. So no lunch at The Sands Hotel for me.

I was then very lucky, as on the other side of Margate High Street is Bentley’s and the seats outside had both shade and a view.

Something that it is ok to eat if you are overweight and need one had to draw with is ham salad without dressing, because you don’t want add the calories or get oil on the paper you are drawing on.

The ham salad provided by Bentley’s of Margate is one fit for a king and the pot of tea was perfect, the price £5.50 for the salad and £1.40 for the pot of tea, so highly recommended.

 Here is the view, which proved a bit too demanding before I had eaten the salad

As you can see the tops of the windows went wrong. Anyway the sun struck again and I had to move on. 

I also realised that what I need was to find some books for my bookshop, I did find a marvellous hand coloured Turner print of Margate in Paraphernalia in the old town. Had it been one of Ramsgate I would have bought it and if you collect old Margate prints it is a very reasonable price.  

Now to get across more of what the daubers doings are about we have to change gears here a bit.

Yesterday evening while my children swam about in the sea, I huddled behind beach hut on Westbrook beach, peering around the edge of it with the wind blowing in my eyes trying to draw the view of Margate and its pier and its lighthouse, on the first page of a new sketchbook. Someone one said to me that if a sketchbook started with a bad sketch the whole thing would be bad and this myth lurks in my mind like the square root of minus one, waiting to niggle me.

As you see the lighthouse is leaning and from this point on nothing went well. 

Back to today, after my sketching in Margate, I drifted into several of the numerous commercial galleries and encountered a picture of the same view with Margate Lighthouse leaning, this made me feel a lot better about my new sketchbook, which also contained a roundish wheel with only one spoke bent in the sun goddesse’s furnace. 

Looking at the fine Turner print in Paraphernalia of the very same view from Westbrook beach I realised that against all the odds Margate Lighthouse had a bit of a lean.

Finally I toddled back to Turner Contemporary to look at The Christopher Alexander Exhibition again, a second look and not one where you are trying to take pictures without initiating gallery rage.

Well straighten my crooked photo of Christopher Alexander’s painting of Margate Pier and Lighthouse.

The As and Bs of paperback fiction, the insanity of war, the madness of blogging and of course the wretched airport, a midweek ramble.

The whole business of selling secondhand paperback fiction has shifted once again, this time it’s due to Amazon changing its free postage. As anyone who buys secondhand books online will probably know, a book listed on Amazon for 1p isn’t necessarily the cheapest, for about a month now the golden year of secondhand books being available for as little as £1 including postage from Amazon has ended. Well not exactly as they still are if you want to buy a tenners worth at one time, but gone are the days of finding the book you want in Waterstones, pointing the amazon app at the barcode and buying is very cheaply. 1p on amazon means £2.81 which with most ordinary paperbacks means that if I have it it will probably be considerably cheaper and it is also likely to be cheaper on Ebay, but this means a lot of fiddling about.

This means that Ebay is fast becoming the biggest player in the world of cheap secondhand paperbacks, form the buyers point of view I think the main factors in it’s favour are that the feedback is easy to follow and most listings are accompanied by a photo of the book.

From my point of view it is the sold listings that are particularly useful at the moment I have just been through the As and Bs in our paperback fiction, the main task being to make sure the one on the shelves in my bookshop are cheaper than you could buy them online.

The other task is to try and work out which books should go on the fairly rapid journey to the 50p section, on to the 5p section and then to recycling, this is where Ebay sold listings come into their own. once you have looked a book up on Ebay set the dropdown “sort” top right on “price +p&p lowest first and dot the circle that says “sold listings” on the left.

I am reading “The Ghost Road” by Pat Barker as part of my trying to understand WW1 this is the third book in the regeneration trilogy, it is exceptionally good, I would put it in the top hundred of fiction written in the last half of the 1900s. It is centred around the treatment of insanity caused by fighting in trenches and focuses on some of the war poets. Dear reader, it is a readers book.

We had two copies on the shelf, one with heavy scoring at 50p and one in good condition at £1.50 which isn’t there now as I am reading it.

Looking it up on amazon the cheapest copy is 1p or £2.81 including postage, on ebay £2.50 including postage. Ebay sold listings show that 19 copies have sold from there in the last three months the cheapest having sold for £1.74, which shows to me a realistic price for someone who is prepared to take a little time and trouble.      

Obviously fiction needs pruning in some way otherwise the non sellers build up to the point where there isn’t room for the books that sell, most of the decisions relating to which books go on the short sharp journey to the being pulped at the paper mill, used to be made by me based on how good the book was, this seemed a bit hard on those books that I hadn’t read. Now I am basing this decision also on whether the book has sold on Ebay in the last three months, that is of course assuming that there are lots of copies listed for sale there.  

So here is a picture of the offending books from the As and Bs which take up about two bookcase in the shop, pulling them out gives me nearly another shelf of space.  

My reading of various books about the first and second world wars is changing my view on the matter, it does seem that the reasons the first world war started were relatively minor and that they could have been avoided.

Sassoon’s Statement raises some interesting questions (Germany wanted to negotiate a peace at this time):

“Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.

3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

July, 1917.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.”

One has to appreciate that this was just after he was awarded the MC for gallantry in the trenches.  

The various airline companies that were using Manson Airport seem to be rapidly pulling out, which indicates closure next month. The Thanet conservative group seem to be blaming the whole thing on Labour not changing the terms of the s106 agreement made in 200 preventing nighttime flying.

I have tried to get some answers her in Simon’s blog about the Conservative lead rescue package, mainly asking the question: Along the lines of if Roger Gale manages to put together a rescue package, would this be based on the Che conservatives offering considerable nighttime flying as soon as they regain the balance of power at TDC.

To me the whole business, why the Conservatives didn’t change the nighttime flying rules when they were in power and why they didn't come up with a better buyer for the airport earlier seems all a bit odd.

I guess in Thanet where most of the floating voters seem to either vote Labour to keep the Conservatives out or Conservative to keep Labour, this about what we would expect.

I is looking as thout the airport is going to close in April, that it isn’t for sale and that as it’s a brownfield site there is very little that government at any level can do to influence development there.

Bit of an update on the Manston front http://www.kentnews.co.uk/news/fresh_manston_airport_blow_as_union_chiefs_emerge_gloomy_1_3488745 which seems to be saying that Ann Gloag intends to sell the airport and not develop the land as we had been assuming.

I have notice that much of the comment on the blog recently seems to be about my administration of the comment left by others, please apricticate I manage the comment here mostly with my mobile and apply the comment rules under the comment box. Comment that is off the subject matter gets deleted if I am not sure about it.  

Sorry if there are any typos or grammatical error in this i typed it up very quickly on the cloud mostly using a bluetooth keyboard with my phone.  

Just noticed that The Shipwrights Jazz Bar has sprouted a scaffold

The soon to be opened Italian in King Street a sign

Reflections from the book trade.

I was saddened to hear that Albion Bookshops in Broadstairs and Cliftonville are to close, this doesn’t effect Albion secondhand bookshop in Broadstairs which will remain open.

It has been said that for a town to be a proper town it has to have a bookshop, for me theatre, library, butcher, baker, grocer, green grocer, fishmonger and so on are all essential, however with the interminable yellow lines and the rising value of real estate and hence shop rents, the future doesn’t look very promising.

With bookshops there is another factor, it’s fairly complicated but I will bore you all with it anyway. In the UK we had a thing called the net book agreement, this meant that the publisher fixed the price of a book and it was illegal to sell the book new under that price. What this meant was that a supermarket couldn’t buy huge quantities of the new Harry Potter and sell it cheaper than the bookshops. This meant that the bookshops, an arts facility, didn’t need to be subsidised like other arts facilities because of the profits from mass-market bestsellers.

The overheads of bookshops were relatively low and the discounts to bookshops about 35% off of retail so that in the case of a book selling for £10 the bookseller got £3.50 the author £1 and the publisher £5.50 the overall effect of this was that books in the UK were the cheapest in the world.

The supermarkets and the big chain bookshops managed to end the net book agreement by saying that price fixing was unfair to the customer, so now most books are bought from publishers by a few very powerful retail chains that expect a minimum discount of 60% so with the same £10 book selling through Amazon Waterstones Tesco and so on the bookseller gets £6 The author £1 and the publisher £3.
Publishers have resolved this by increasing the price of books in real terms so that now apart from the promotional titles where the big chain retailer reduces their profit cut, books in the UK are now amongst the most expensive in the world.