Watercolour painting of Canterbury, a peek inside Margate Winter Gardens, photos of Canterbury, possible ramble…

I went to a craft fair at Margate Winter Gardens this morning, I don’t often go there these days but was struck by how the décor seems to have extended up to the mid 1970s and frozen in time. I suppose this sort of only in Thanet stuff relates to the point at which the Thanet towns lost their own councils and most of the TDC budget presumably went into some sort of Parkinson’s Law.

On to Canterbury with children, while I was engaged in shopping with teenage children – I do this remotely (Argos universal) from Chocolate café, I did what?

Painted the beginning of this Canterbury watercolour of the reflections in the windows opposite.  

The next bit is man goes to Canterbury and takes loads of photos with his mobile phone and then puts them on the internet. How embarrassing is that?

Like most people with a smart phone I use it to take pictures – my smart phone is very old now, I bought it in 2012, the camera is only 8 MP – but I do have the app that automatically uploads all of the pictures I take onto the net; so I don’t have to actually do anything to put them online, for anyone barmy enough here is the link to all of the photos I took with my phone today https://goo.gl/photos/ZfqMdBnB8PwuDNh66

Allthatsaid, there are people who for one reason or another can’t easily wander around Canterbury come into my bookshop and see what stock we put out yesterday, so here is the link to that too http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/shipwrecks-in-seaside-town-bookshop.html

Oh and thanks to the charming young lady who made me origami while she watched me paint.

Turner Contemporary Broken Again, and some other musings on today’s visit to Margate.

Today was my third consecutive visit to the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate where at least two of the exhibits in the Rosa Barba exhibition have been out of order.

Photography is banned in this exhibition and frankly I couldn’t be bothered to draw it again. My understanding is that two million pounds of public funding are required to run this gallery for a year.

Half of this funding comes out of the Kent County council purse and therefore out of our council tax. I am beginning to wonder if this is something I should complain to the council about, like a blocked drain.

There were fewer people in the upstairs galleries where the Carl Andre, William Turner, Rosa Barba exhibitions are than I have ever see, although this may be a coincidence.

When I first visited this new exhibition I reviewed it, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/carl-andre-and-rosa-barba-at-turner.html and have been back again http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/carl-andre-and-rosa-barba-at-turner_10.html and again http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know.html

Frankly it is very difficult to criticise both modern and contemporary art but this is not a good collection of exhibitions, the Turners are not really works of art but Turner’s lecture illustrations, the Andre is a bit of a hodgepodge of his works and looks like what was available rather than what would have been chosen and the Barba both doesn’t work because the artist has chosen a medium beyond her ability and because it is intrusive – noise and flickering light – to the other exhibitions.

My reason for being in Margate related to delivering children and collecting them from The Winter Gardens, so I took a few pictures of the inside of the venue.

After this cream tea at The Walpole Bay Hotel.