Painting the town of Sandwich and buying a useful manual - for flagellants - for my bookshop.

Here is the beginning of the watercolour painting of Sandwich Guildhall from the café over The Shop With No Name, I have added a 5p coin for scale in case anyone thinks that I am painting big pictures.

A photo for aspiring art critics.

Books Do Furnish A Room, don’t they? You know what is like when you go round to one your mates for a bevy and there is a beautiful bookcase, and then you approach it and the contents are boring boring boring and you think expletively. Don’t you? Particularly if the books are old ones, what? They should be knouted.

Flat Erick seemed very interested in this one and muttered something about, spare the rod and spoil the frog.

The C1880 edition will set you back about £15 or you could of course try kindling it, but this would mean you wouldn’t be able to display it on your bookshelves where your friends could see it, something that could lead to something else. 

I went on to buy Christmas underwear from M C Escher in Deal

Painting Ramsgate Harbour Arches from Miles Bar Ramsgate at lunchtime today.

When I got back from lunch, she who must be obeyed said my Painting of Ramsgate Harbour Arches looked smaller than she expected, so I have included the 50p for scale.

I had text it to her when the sun started shining in my eyes and I had to stop.

There wasn’t much of my lunchtime left, so I turned round and did a quick pen sketch of the inside of Miles Bar Ramsgate and went back to work to price more railway books.   

With a bit of luck it will be cloudy next time and I can get some more of the painting done.

Books about Railway Trains, all in a days work.

Back to work today and I put on my anorak and processed railway books, I am interested in trains, published a book on the Ramsgate Railways, see http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_all_change.htm and the following links for some historical pictures of Ramsgate that I used in the book http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/rac/index.htm http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/rac/id2.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/rac/id4.htm

I’ve got about another hundred railway books to process and no other takers for the job.

Of course other books got possessed, here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out in the bookshop today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-pier-at-books-on-our-shelves.html and as you can see I didn’t do that much work today.

This is the view from my workstation, station being the operative word here. Back in the day when I misspent my youth trains ran on steam and once I managed to get away to boarding school, I travelled there by steam train. Breakfast on the train from Ramsgate to London and lunch on the train from London to Alton. So perhaps I have developed some sort of empathy with steam trains.

Anyway as the day wore on and I rubbed out old prices, dusted off the train books, covered the dust jackets with cellophane, looked them up on Amazon and pencilled prices a bit cheaper than the Amazon ones in the books, suddenly the shop filled up with a very strong smell of steam train.  

Frankly I thought the toys in my attic had finally come completely loose and I rather cautiously asked she who must be obeyed if she could smell steam train, like burning coal and long boiled kettle and yes she could, not just weird but positively wyrd.   

So I guess I haven’t gone off the rails, I am sitting at my desk with my lollypop, which is very like my workstation – the desk not the lollypop – typing up this blog post with Flat Eric invigilating, spelling grammar and content fails, wondering who the frog is – I don’t like to ask in case I should know. 

Chocolate Café in Canterbury watercolour painting of Canterbury Cathedral spot the difference and some sketches of people in the café today.

As shopping was on the agenda today and it is an activity to which I have a severe allergy, I spent a large part of the day in Chocolate Café.

So here are the before and afters – spot the difference with

the watercolour painting of Canterbury Cathedral. The technique being to do a very loose sketch and then paint detail over the top. Click compulsively on pictures to make them bigger and bigger. 

Inbetweenthepaint what? Psyche myself up to sketch the people, try this if you can, very interesting. But? Stupid, perhaps not.  

How to paint a picture on a moving bus, painting Canterbury Cathedral form Chocolate Café and drawing women on busses.

My day off yesterday, which for the secondhand bookseller is always a bit of a busman’s holiday unless I take the bus which means I can’t carry loads of book home and do truly get a day off from my main job, buying and sellin books.

 So off I goes on the Canterbury bus and sketched the view from the  seat, this is a bit like adjusting the set, getting your hand in, so you can draw. Getting out of the the way of the bit between the bit of your brain that does art and the end of  the pen and brush; don't talk to me about pencils

 So I got to a sort of "Do not adjust your brain, reality is at fault." stage. And then what? Drew the girl in the next seat, When the bus arrived I the the rather embarrassing. "Please miss I just drew you." bit, which went fairly well and the drawing went in the phone. I then put as many people exiting the bus between subject and artist, in case I was mistaken for a senile perv with a bad pick up line and went of to Chocolate Cafe, for the view.

 Here is the watercolour painting of Canterbury Cathedral wot I am doin from there, where? Chocolate Cafe.

 Puttin detail in the middle bit.

Sketched some of the people in Chocolate cafe, couldn't get the words out and scurried off to the bus and got on the one going the wrong way, via Margate. Temporary insanity caused by art, what's the cure? Don't paint and draw? Exactly.

 Sat upstairs, front seat and tried to draw the view as the rain meant you couldn't see out of the window

It wasn't that good.

Changed buses in Margate and drew some ladies who being a bit older meant I didn't have to say anything much, they seemed pleased by the divertion.

Acol Art Group at The York Street Gallery in Ramsgate

The current Exhibition  is by Acol Art Group The exhibition runs  10th November - 17th November Exhibitions change weekly on Wednesdays.

The start of a watercolour of the interior of The Peter Cushing in Whitstable and some thoughts on music formats’

Not sure if this watercolour sketch of a watercolour of the interior of The Peter Cushing in Whitstable of The Peter Cushing in Whitstable will pass muster, or if I will start again, the pad is standing upright on my desk at the moment and I am thinking on.

The main issue is that every time I go to my favourite winter lunch spot in Whitstable I will do a bit more of the sketch, layers and layers as JWMT would say, and in this one it’s the art deco light shades that give the problem. Hard to draw and hard to get in the right place.

I think painting interiors is more difficult than townscapes and it’s a good place to paint.   

I’m not really sure when I started acquiring recorded music, some time around 1960 I would guess. At around the age of seven it was the format that the adults where getting rid of that could be acquired, usually for free. 78 rpm records, called wax records, but I think shellac (beetle droppings) perhaps there was a huge beetle farming industry. Being a fairly lazy type I never really changed format, so much as got the new player and continued using the old one too. Frankly I use the whole lot.

78s

vinyl

cds

Press 3 if you want to press 8 and listen to boring advert while trying to get rid of the pop up advert.

file downloads

but generally get on best with something physical that is large enough to find.

Anyway today I bought a gramophone record which I put on the gramophone, which while it is not the latest model, works reasonably well, doesn’t require much in the way of special training to operate and honestly the quality doesn’t seem to be significantly worse than the average across all the formats.  

A bit like photographing something and processing it in the darkroom, photographing something with a digital camera or just painting it I suppose.

Anyone recognise this waterfall in Whitstable?

rest of photos

Pleasurama aka Royal Sands Ramsgate cliff façade repairs.

Bit like painting The Fourth Bridge this one, the contractors have now got to repairing the other end of the façade and the mortar between the blocks while at the end they started is already crumbling so the paint has fallen off. Click on the picture to expand it and you can see what I mean.

  Here is the diagram for the confused, the yellow bit seems to have been designed by a drunken civil engineer with bad eyesight and the council still won’t tell me if the main support pillars have any foundations. If they have then they aren’t the load spreaders shown on the design plans.

The green bit was built after the 1937 collapse and appears to be a good solid piece of work that is pretty near the 100 year concrete sell by date.

The purple bit is what remains of the bit that was built in 1860, the rest collapsed and then collapsed halfway through the rebuild, 1960s or 70s can’t be bothered to look it up. As you cansee if you expand the photo of it has no proper foundations. You don't even need to expand this one.

Is it 107 or 109 apartments they intend to build under this façade?

The last repair which was about £1m on our council tax didn’t last very long, and the council won’t tell me tell me what this one cost or if they have an engineers report saying how they intend to do the next repair with the new development three metres away from the cliff façade and about the same height.  

With no drain holes in the purple bit I wonder how the water that builds up behind it gets out, perhaps through the missing foundations at the bottom