A couple of sketches of La Trappiste in Canterbury, Android phone memory problems, oh what the hell memory problems in general.

Yesterday morning, while the more pious family members were out god bothering, I went out and bought several boxes of books for my bookshop, we all then went to Canterbury.

The object of the mission being clothes and shoe shopping, an activity to which I am allergic, so I went of to paint the town.    

Having painted the view from La Trappiste in Canterbury, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Paintings%20and%20drawings%20of%20Canterbury I thought I would try to find a location to paint La Trappiste from.

This one is from Mrs Jones's Kitchen, which was ok

And this from Café Chambers which was better.

Both are preliminary sketches I think aspects of the drawing, particularly the perspective needs practice.

Over the last few weeks my phone has been giving trouble, the symptoms were messages saying not enough memory to update this app or that app, combined with the whole thing slowing down.

I started out removing apps that I didn’t really need, which worked for a while, I installed Cleanmaster which worked for a while, but yesterday I ran out of solutions.

My phone is a Galaxy Note GT-7000, the mark one of the Note series and is typical of the sort of old smart phone that you can get on Ebay for about £50, it dates from 2011. In terms of memory ROM RAM if you like, it has four different memories.

About 1 GB of RAM, which does the thinking and about 75 GB of ROM, which does the storing. 

Back in the day RAM was made of lots of tiny ferrite beads threaded onto a matrix of copper wires, currents in the wires caused the beads to be charged or the charge to be read where the wires converged. This was all a long time ago and don't trust my memory on this, but I think the first RAM computer memory I used was on a wooden frame (wires threaded between holes in the wood) about a foot square, and about 1 kilobyte. The ROM was on magnetic tape on big reels.

On my phone the ROM memory (storage in the settings) is called,

1 “device memory” about 2 GB, this is where the apps and bits of the apps you can’t move elsewhere have a sort of life.

2 USB storage about 11 GB, which is just like a memory card you can’t get out of the phone.

Added together this 1, 2 and 11 and 1 of RAM makes up the 16 GB that it says on the packet.

3 SD card storage, which is the memory card which you can put in the phone, I think this can be anything up to 64GB and is you usually where you store you pictures, docs, music and videos.  

OK we all know there is 1 GB missing and this is mostly taken up with the operating system, on the phone this is called Android, on a conventional computer it will be called Windows or some such thing.

Fortunately there is the other memory called the cloud which all your stuff is automatically stored to, providing you phone is set properly and that memory is on the internet, so it still stays there if your phone explodes or something.

The only solution was taking the phone back to its factory settings.

So now I have a laptop running Windows 10, a tablet running Lollipop 5.1 and a phone running Jelly Bean 4.1.2, fortunately all interconnected by the cloud.

Having wiped the phone I have got my memory back and nearly everything it had on it before the memory problem was reinstalled automatically once I signed on to Google.

What I think happened was that the phone started backing everything it did on the internal memory, and lost the ability to delete it.  

Technological impasse

The last few days have seen some of my techno lumps fail, the most personally significant being my phone pad thingy, known here as the RaspBerry. Once upon a time when this sort of thing happened one took it back to the shop where it either got mended or one bought a new one, now a combination of the cost of repairs and the pace of technology means a different approach.

Even if you could buy one for a reasonably competitive price in a shop, you wouldn’t be able to effectively try before you buy, so the ghastly mixture of looking around phone shops and reading internet reviews had to be gone through, before getting the best deal online.

Being somewhat decayed, with sausage like fingers and a need for reading glasses I went for the largest phone with a reasonable camera that would fit in my pocket. I also stuck with the Android operating system that I have become used to, the choice was a “Samsung Galaxy Note” and I have spent the last 24 hours doing little else other than trying to master the thing. 

One of the most difficult aspects of this is publishing blog posts from it, now mastered, it is one of the best silicone based writing mediums since the stone tablet.

The Android operating system lacks the fundamental business of underlining spelling mistakes which is irritating and the main thing it falls down on, all I can promise is to try and make corrections when I get to an ordinary computer where any dubious typos appear underlined within the blogger editor.

The picture is of one of my earlier RaspBerries 

You can’t always say what you want

The RaspBerry

I suppose one way or another we are all waiting for a phone call, text message or email and for one reason or another we all have the phone calls, text messages and emails that we can’t or won’t do.

In these days where most people can use various communication devices to send images, I wanted to produce an image that people could send, when they can’t say what they want.

With the Turner Contemporary opening in Margate, where a lot of the art on display is and will be Modern, contemporary and some of it is and will be conceptual art, I wanted also to form some sort of link for the local people, many of whom have contributed towards the cost of this gallery, where they could see some sort of point in the this sort of thing.

If art is anything it has to be about conveying something that can’t be conveyed in words. There is also a sense in which art has to justify itself, show it has some point or purpose, this was easy in the days before photography, but now aspects of art can seem pointless.

The idea here was to produce an item, artwork if you like, that was in a sense both useless and useful and also to explain its purpose clearly.

More pictures of The RaspBerry at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/raspberry as far as copyright goes help yourselves to the images, no need to ascribe them to me or anything like that.

I did a couple of posts recently with drawings of Tracy Emin and David Cameron in them, that illustrate just how powerful a communication tool art still is. 

In both cases my posts with them were on the first page of Google today here are the screenshots 

I think it fair to say that with Google finding about 43,400,000 webpages for the search phrase David Cameron, without the art aspect my post wouldn’t have featured in the top ten.


Very little in art is entirely original, artists look at other artists work and this influences and inspires what they produce, the primary inspiration for The RaspBerry is a work by the artist Conroy Maddox called Onanistic Typewriter  you can always Google it if you want to know what I mean.


I produced a work called Onanistic Netbook here it is

Art tends to inspire reaction in other artists and two artists I was talking to and photographing this week Andrea Francke and Mary Ikoniadou added further inspiration.

I will do a post about their work and their recent appearance in Broadstairs at a later date, here are a couple of pictures I took of them at the weekend.     

A question that has been floating around here in Thanet since The Turner Contemporary opened is, what is art? And a question that has been put to people in the past is, are you an artist?

There are different answers here of course, one chap quizzed in this way drew freehand a perfect circle another a perfect straight line. No one really seems to have come up with the goods, when it comes to expressing the answer verbally.  

For me being able to draw a picture of someone that is recognisably that person, seems a reasonable qualification. 

Another indicator is putting something one has produced in front of someone who has qualified academically as an artist and having the something pronounced “good” or “OK” in terms of art, this is also something that would suggest one is an artist.

I stopped producing art in any form about forty years ago, mainly because of the trouble it caused, now I have started again and have run a few of the results through some of these criteria.

One problem is that once one starts again it isn’t easy to stop. 

Now we come to one of my concerns about The Turner Contemporary, which is are they pulling off what they hope to achieve, this isn’t quite as simple as are they getting the visitor numbers now?

What I mean here is, in the terms of the parameters of what they hoped to achieve, at the moment an exhibition of contemporary art, is what they are displaying good, average or bad.

Looked at as it were in the way readers of this blog have looked at the various bits of art that I have put there recently, does it work? This is quite easily explained in terms of the pencil sketches of Tracy Emin and David Cameron, regardless of whether you think they were good or bad, if they have changed your visual perception of these people slightly, then they have done what I set out to achieve.

I have only one only one tangible way of measuring the public’s genuine interest in what the gallery is doing and that is by looking at the viewing counters on the various videos they have published online.

The gallery published a video embedded in their website yesterday and since then it has had only 87 viewings I did the same thing with some videos on this blog on Sunday, within 24 hours they had all had several hundred viewings.

Now sitting through four or five minutes of video to the end so that the counter clocks your viewing suggests a genuine interest in the content of the video and my concern is that the genuine interest isn’t as much as it should be.