Batman at Bernie’s, watercolour and felt tip sketching in Margate and Ramsgate.

I started the day with Toast and Marmalade at Miles Cafe in Ramsgate, I had started another picture of this view but couldn't find it this morning, so I started again.

I got some fairly thick felt tips in a charity shop and have been doing some very quick, less than 5 mins sketches with them.

Then off to Turner Contemporary in Margate where I did a bit more to my watercolour sketch of Margate Lighthouse from the gallery's cafe.

Another fast felt tip sketch, this time Margate Droit House

over another ploughman's lunch there, 

not quite in the league of last week's on the vegetation front, but still pretty good.

Eventually my teenage children turned up, the current exhibition doesn't do it for them, like me it's a case of film that doesn't do the box office at the cinema has no place in an art gallery, which should be displaying something you can't/couldn't display on your own technology.

We walked around the TC exhibition for a bit and the conversation moved from aesthetics to chocolate with some rapidity, so on to Bernie's for hot chocolates, where they had an exhibition of Batman related art by Peter Hammond see https://www.facebook.com/peterdamienh and with original art you can only see it by seeing it, it aint like film which looks the same at home.

Watercolour sketching in Margate today, Sands Hotel, Bernie’s Chocolate Café and Turner Contemporary Café.

This watercolour sketch is from The Sands Hotel in Margate

By way of explanation, one of the smoke alarms in my bookshop started making beeping noises indicative of a flat battery at 5am.

Having found the culprit and disarmed it

I tried to make coffee and realised the noise I was making trying to get last nights out of the wosisname was bad

I walked across the kitchen to get a spoon to dig it out, when the coffee fell out, high on caffeine I repaired to Margate, where

me being somewhat inconvenient after the coffee The Sands Hotel was the only place open and comes highly recommended for an early breakfast in Margate.

on to Bernie’s Chocolate Café where I did a bit to the painting I started the other week

on to Turner Contemporary, where I was handed a leaflet about all the stuff going on there today "Live in the Gallery" including "T S Eliot Margate and Madness" and being terrified that I would engage in some way, I went to Turner Contemporary Café where I was disturbed by

this label on a granite block but eventually got my stuff out ready to paint and had just roughed in the shape of the inside of the cafe, 

when a gallery attendant appeared and asked me if I wanted to make my confession, I explained that I was a bishop of The Church of Aphrodite and that after the Hyde Park festival I wan't going to make a confession either there or later in court

my painting then moved forward in the spirit of The Draughtsman's Contract, vide beauty spot and perhaps not,

  back to Bernie’s Chocolate Café, and up the stairs in previous picture of Bernie’s Chocolate Café, above, from which vantage point, also above I painted

 just in time

  

I had done so much work in my bookshop yesterday that the railway and ship books I processed yesterday seem to have leaked onto today's bookshop blog http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/yes-more-railway-books-available-at.html 

Painting pictures in Margate at Bernie’s and Canterbury at Chocolate Cafe, with chocolate and tiffin, while revisiting misspent my youth.

This last week, has been one of those weeks, my misspent youth caught up with me in a way that meant I felt I had to contact some old friends from the 60s and 70s, who I had lost touch with.

As I am what I euphemistically call 59 and a great many of my friends from back then were older than me, euphemistically 69 – not that sort of 69 – quite a few of them transpired to be pushing up daisy’s. So there have been a few. Wahts? Well I suppose if you are expecting it, confirmations rather than shocks.

This means that when I have taken time out I have gone to the cafés which I think have the best atmosphere and painted myself into relaxation. This is a bit like when you paint a floor and don’t finish at the door, but manage by luck to arrive by the window, on the ground floor and step through it into a nice day.

Yesterday I went to Margate, I wanted to look at Michael Blaker’s exhibition again, I like his work so much that I would go up to London to look at it, yea I took the photos, but not the same thing. I also discovered that although you can’t photograph the “Risk Exhibition” at Turner Contemporary you can photograph the labels in the exhibition, and as there is no exhibition catalogue, my remit was to photograph the labels so that I can go around the exhibition and sketch them to produce a catalogue.   

So off we go you and me, the 500 or so people who read this blog every day according to the page counter, hold my hand. Puctures will enlarge if clicked on compulsively.

 Breakfast @ Bernie's Chocolate Bar Margate I was too tender for anywhere else.

 Vincent's Tea pot Don McLean?

 While on the subject of music they played "Aquarius" last time i was in there. and while humming along to this is the dawning.. it dawned on as it would anyone who bought the album in - oh no not 69 again - in the way that it does if you are used to the tracks on an album that something extraordinary could happen.

This time they played Devilgate Drive, well I thought Suzi Quatro had been banned from cafes after the incident with the tight trousers and the chain. I tried unsuccessfully not to enjoy it, well now you know; it's the atmosphere.

Popping pictures on a wall that could be a ceiling is tricky as things can flip in one permanent and boring dimension.   

Things seem to be OK so far, hope to get back there soon.

Next a few Margate photos.

 Volvo 142 very rare car.

 In Turner Contemporary, where you are allowed to take photos. And aren't allowed to paint, no fluids, "Perhaps you could lick the brush." "Perhaps you could lick it for me, my dear."

This last one really needs a sign on it saying. "This is Not an Art Exhibit" I had me fooled.

M&S in the evening, I made the best of the cafe without. What?

Today Remembrance first, picture at top of post, says what I want to say.

Then Chocolate Cafe in Canterbury.

 Here is the tiffin

 These are the prelims to populating the picture with people, the artistic trick may be arranging two boy and girl couples at tables offset, one behind the other so that either the two girls or the two boys look like they may or may not be about be about to kiss, when you first glance at the picture. Then when you look at it again, you realise that they are not even opposite each other.