Friday, 24 February 2017

Would you recognise Ramsgate when you got there and a Friday ramble.

This recognising caper is something that isn’t as easy as you would expect
This is looking up Ramsgate High Street in 1917 from the middle of the town centre where Harbour, Queen King and High Streets meet.




 Knowing what’s supposed to be there isn’t much help either, we publish a street directory for 1915 http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id329.htm you could of course come into my bookshop and try to work it all out, however I have just taken one of the shelf and taken photos of the High Street pages.


even much later this is York Street in 1994, it isn't easy.


 the seafront is easier
 even when the picture was taken over 100 years ago
 and of course it helps when it says what it is on the front

 This is one of the boating lake on Ramsgate's Westcliff if you wondered

 I do wonder how many get away because they don't say Ramsgate on them.


Thursday, 23 February 2017

Entangled – Threads in the Making at Turner Contemporary Margate another review attempt and some old Thanet Pictures

Another go at this exhibition and while I find some of the individual exhibits interesting, for me it still doesn’t seem to work as a cohesive whole exhibition.


I did what I usually do, which is to have a quick wander around the exhibition then go into the gallery cafĂ©, have a cuppa and a bite to eat while sketching the view out of the window, then go round the exhibition again trying to produce some reasonable pictures of the exhibition and think about what I am going to say about the exhibition. Here are the pictures which should expand if you click on them.


















I think perhaps the biggest problem for me is so many different artists which left me confused.

A big plus with this exhibition is that now photography is allowed throughout the whole gallery. With a lot of this type of art the explanation – which in practice is mostly given by the gallery attendants – is fairly involved, so whereas when the exhibition first opened with photography, most of the attendant’s time was spent asking people to stop taking photos, now it is mostly spent talking to the visitors.   

Anyway I finished off my painting in the cafe 
I had a notion that I could perhaps develop a sort of inside and outside view, to try and express how I felt. 

I guess an issue with verbal or written explanations for visual art is that one decoding becomes another encoding and I honestly felt that an explanation of how over fifty artists had produced all of the exhibits would only leave me confused at a higher level. 


On to the old local pictures










Wednesday, 22 February 2017

Some old Ramsgate and Margate pictures and a ramble

Just had a look at the local internet which is a – not much going on that we can do anything about that I can see, the Hornby Hobbies visitor centre on the old slipways site has fallen through. I’ve been posting about this site and various plans to develop it since 2010, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Ramsgate%20slipways%20development?updated-max=2011-03-02T14:34:00Z&max-results=40&start=12&by-date=false

For some reason the result of all of this has been a very messy building site and nothing else, which is bad for Ramsgate.

POW! Thanet's International Women's Day festival Wed 8 - Sat 11 Mar 2017 brings together fifty events over four days across the three main towns of Thanet. This year, their theme Movers and Makers has been chosen especially to tie in with Entangled: Threads & Making which features over 40 international women artists at Turner Contemporary. It’s an impressive looking program, here is the link https://www.turnercontemporary.org/media/documents/POW-Thanet_2017_Brochure_Final_9-2-17%20f%20LRc.pdf

I am aiming to get back to Turner Contemporary and have another look at “Entangled: Threads & Making” an exhibition which I am having difficulty with, as it is all women artists this may be because I’m a man, so another go at that one.

If anyone knows of a good independently written review of this exhibition I would be glad if the could post the link in the comments.  

Sorry if some of the pictures are same old – same old, it’s very difficult to remember which ones I have put on here before, putting up local pictures on the internet most days for the last ten years has produced a bit of a memory malfunction.


My day off tomorrow as my bookshop in Ramsgate is closed on Thursdays so although a lot of books have gone out in the shop, best leave it ‘till Friday or Saturday. Here is the link to the pictures of the books http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/