Lovely’s Art Shop and Bernie's Chocolate Bar in Margate

FAQ why am I listening to "Sodomy" by Donnie Dacus having looked for Donna? Wondering vaguely why this sixteen year old virgin isn’t on Wikipedia in the right place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair:_Original_Soundtrack_Recording when I realise that the album can’t date from 1979 as I first heard it in the smoking room at school when I was 16 in 1968, it had to be as I wouldn’t have been allowed in there until I was 16 and I left school just after I was 17.

The album is right as yousee. Click on to expand

Why would I go to Lovely’s and spend £20.34 on two paintbrushes when I could have bought them online for £13.86? The answer to this is easy because I could try them first and I tried several of the same make and size before I was happy with the one’s I bought. There is of course the snag with online bought ones that they could be fakes.

I have become a fan of Bernie's Chocolate Bar, and when I sat down "Aquarius" from “Hair” started to play, well you know how it is with music, you tend to expect the next tracks on the album to appear.

Hence – perhaps – the unusual perspective in the paining of the inside of Bernie's Chocolate Bar in Margate.

Some of today's pictures now.

  

not one of my pictures this, but handy for rinsing the bow and arrow one at TC from the mind

A watercolour sketch from Fredericks Tea Room in Westgate-on-Sea, a lovelier Lovelys Art Shop in Cliftonville and maybe some thoughts.

Here is the watercolour sketch from Fredericks Tea Room in Westgate-on-Sea, part of the cinema building, and what a building, although not mentioned in Pevsner (sic Newman) even in a derisory way. It’s a Swiss-Gothic style 1910 extravaganza originally built as a town hall. Westgate-on-Sea just wasn’t big enough for a town hall of these proportions, and in 1912, it was transformed into the Town Hall Cinema. In 1932, it was renamed the Carlton Cinema.

I was hoping to find somewhere to sketch the whole building from, however even if you could find somewhere and sketch around the traffic and parked cars, today most of the town hall’s roadworks equipment was parked outside the building obscuring it even more.

Really Fredericks Tea Room is the only place to sit down and have lunch in that part of Westgate-on-Sea, and of course that is in the building I wanted to sketch.

On to Lovelys in Northdown Road Cliftonville, where they have expanded their artist’s materials department.  

Here are the rest of the photos on my phone

Margate Art Lovely Lovelys is 120

Lovelys the art shop in Northdown Road, Cliftonville in Margate is celebrating its 120^th anniversary, I went there today to get some bits and pieces and they have just opened a contemporary art gallery upstairs.

The picture of the advertisement above is from the book I publish “Margate and Westgate With Birchington 1903-04”

The exhibition on there, starting today and on until 9^th July is called “Fish and Ships” this is three dimensional pictures and sculptures made of papier-mâché (French lit; mashed paper). This is well worth a look at.

I once made a full sized rowing boat out of papier-mâché and can imagine it wouldn’t be easy stuff to sculpt well.

I was very taken by the brush and the three dimensional picture of Lovelys shop.

When it comes to buying artist’s materials Lovelys is the place to go in Thanet, they have some very good special offers and a comprehensive high quality stock.

As I mentioned in a previous post I have taken up painting and drawing again after a forty year gap and decided the painting had better be watercolour, at the moment I am at the pre amateur stage with this so am using mostly the quality of materials that children use. However there are some things you just have to buy from an art shop, one of these is gummed tape so you can stretch the paper, otherwise it goes all crinkly when you get it wet, another is a small flat pocket water bottle, unless you are going to make your own water, as it were.

When the need for these came up I had to visit a certain well known shopping centre with a chain art shop, they didn’t have either. The gummed tape in particular surprised me as you can’t really paint with watercolour without it and they had masses of watercolour paint and paper.

Anyway Lovelys had a selection of both.

Bit of a problem with the my new camera, I still haven’t got used to it so that it takes me much longer to get the settings right, taking pictures in a relatively small place like Lovelys, moving very slowly and pressing the wrong buttons tends to unnerve people.

I wanted to get the three dimensional pictures to look three dimensional, sorry to say this didn’t work too well, anyway here is what was on the camera card http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop611/id5.htm