Ramsgate Harbour Arches Watercolour, some progress, some thoughts on the difficult to identify Ramsgate photos and then it all runs into books, chocolate, skeletons and weird stuff

The day started with breakfast and a bot more painting on my watercolour of Ramsgate Harbour Arches at Ship Shape.

 I skulked around the likely areas and took some photos, here is the link to them for anyone wanting to try and work it out https://goo.gl/photos/d97VicV5HyxawyuU7

Off to Canterbury where I bought some books for my bookshop

A rather bizarre session in the cathedral

I thought this was Becket's Crown, i.e. where his head was kept for pilgrims before Henry VIII had all of Becket's remains destroyed, or possibly they lay in an unmarked grave in the crypt.

With these rather morbid thoughts, some of you may find the photos I took a bit disturbing.

 On to Chocolate Cafe and some more painting

Ramsgate Watercolour painting started and a bit of a ramble

This is from Ship Shape Cafe over breakfast, coffee with toast and marmalade

start painting a yellow door and it opens

I have been very busy in my bookshop during the last couple of days.

Here is the link to the fiction books that went away today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/fiction-in-bookshop.html

And the books that went out on the shelves yesterday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/paperback-potters-in-bookshop.html

I’m not quite sure if this sort of thing falls in to bracket of advertising or arts, always a bit of a grey area bookshops, a library or art gallery would probably attract public funding, while bookshops tend to get taxed in the same way as betting shops and takeaways. 

Does, for instance saying you have just put out a lot of Thomas Hardy locally fall into the same bracket as a local art gallery saying they have just put a constable on display?

Having written a leaflet about when the Thanet bookshops are open with a bit of Margate history for the tourist information office there, I am now doing one for Canterbury. to be honest I was surprised how popular the Margate one has been. 

Mostly painting Ramsgate and Canterbury today, also a few photos

I did a it more on my Ramsgate watercolour painting from The Oak Hotel this morning, it was a very blocked by white van experience as would be expected early in the morning and in the middle of the café culture.

After that we went to Canterbury, I found a spot in the shade, under the air con but in the downstairs window of Chocolate Café in Canterbury. Changing my table meant starting a new painting, so some progress photos.

Also a few Canterbury photos

Rainbow watercolour painting en plein air, in Ramsgate this morning

Ramsgate rainbow painting this morning, not something you expect to get when just going to start doing the sky.

OK I own up I did move it a bit to the right, the thing with watercolour is you can't paint light on dark so rainbows before skies

Save Manston Airport, some sort of update and today’s sketching in Canterbury

Back when Manston Airport closed over two years ago and long before any alternative plans for the site, a group formed to save the airport as an airport.

As with many protest/pressure/support/groups, the main focal point was the Facebook group “Save Manston Airport”. Obviously writing this blog I joined this group so that when I posted about the Manston Airport issue I did so having read the posts there.

I first realised that something was up about a week ago when I was removed from the group, I sent them a message pointing out that I never abused my membership, but as this blog gets about 1,000 hits a day they may prefer me to read their point of view.

I was told that the SMA moderation committee had asked the following:-

“Does he support the reinstatement and development of the airport?

Does he support the scale of enhancement that RiverOak seek to obtain through the DCO process?

Is he prepared to support the Committee's judgment that RO deserve SMA's support?”

Obviously this Orwellian mantra wasn’t something I signed up to when I joined and I came to conclusion that doublethink was beyond my intellect.

As George Orwell said “If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?”

Anyway out of the flames of SMA, SMAA is born

"Save Manston Airport association shared a group.
August 19 at 6:50pm ·
In a dramatic turn of events during the afternoon of 18th August 2016 the Founder of the Save Manston Airport association unlawfully stripped the Management Committee of its social media powers and assumed sole control of the Facebook page. All bar one of the administrators of the site, as well as the moderators, who devote so many hours keeping it "clean", were blocked and this was followed by a “cull” of existing members.

It is important to stress that this does not affect the Save Manston Airport association. The Facebook page, following the adoption of the Constitution in 2014, was merely a means of communication. The Management Committee are still in full control and have established;
• a Facebook presence athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/savemanstonairportassociation
• a Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/ManstonSave
• a YouTube channel athttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJeZS3LGkiXEkYK8shMB2Zg
•

The main WordPress site http://www.savemanstonairport.org.uk/wordpress/is still under the control of the Committee.
If you have not signed up on there yet, please go to the Membership tab and sign up so we have your details for SMAa reach-out and emails.

As can be imagined a great deal of discussion took place within the organisation, following this development. Committee members and activists were involved and agreed the following;

1. That the actions of the Founder merely disassociated his Facebook page from the Save Manston Airport association. This was reinforced when the owner of the intellectual rights to the SMA logo insisted that it be removed from the Founder's Facebook page.

2. That the existing SMA Management Committee would continue in post until the next Annual General Meeting. One Committee member has been party to the Founder's actions and has therefore removed herself from the Committee as a result of her own actions.

3. The Management Committee also have a scheduled bi-monthly meeting within the next week. The situation will be reviewed at this meeting.

4. That a Special General Meeting of the Association will be called in the very near future, when a new Constitution will be presented for approval.

Dr. Beau Webber
Chairman, Save Manston Airport association"

My own take from the beginning has been to support local employment on the site provided that the environmental affects don’t produce significant problems.

At the moment I think that plans by RiverOak for an airfreight hub may produce levels of particulate air pollution that would result in a significant reduction in life expectancy.

I had a fairly protracted telephone conversation with RiverOak’s environmental consultant’s last week and am awaiting their promised email reply to me, so as they say I am on it.

I don’t think it matters very much what you support or don’t support at Manston the DCO is a front loaded process and problems have to be sought and addressed at an early stage.

On to today and painting.

The main thing I addressed was trying to sketch people looking down on them again, here is today’s attempt

The problem here is not so much an artistic one as a philosophical one, so here we go.

There was this guy called Emanuel Kant, and he was the first person to work out that for the most part what we perceive when we see something, isn’t so much what our eyes actually see, but a combination of what they see and what they expect to see, based on what they have already seen.

So for instance if you go into a kitchen, part of what you see is based on your mind’s previous experience of kitchens. A stone age man or woman would see something completely different and were they to see someone flying they would assume it was magic – type of kidney.

Anyway this kitchen, hang glider, wosisname in the head is particularly strong in terms of what a human face should look like, meaning that if you sketch people’s heads looking down on them from an upstairs window, the brain converts this into perceiving it a looking across at them.


a few photos taken today next