Saturday 25 February 2017

Some old Ramsgate pictures, a St Peter’s one and my dubious attempts at painting inside Canterbury Cathedral today.

First the old local pictures, I hope there aren’t too many repeats of ones I have put up before




















I skived off from work in my bookshop today and spent some of it sitting on a blow-up cushion on a stone seat in Canterbury Cathedral trying to paint the inside using the wrong type of paper – which like the wrong type of snow is white, looks the same but behaves differently to the right type.


The thing that really gets me is that this is very expensive paper and is supposed to be the right type, I think the problem is the amount of seize they put on it which stops the paint from soaking in, this means that it takes ages to dry, so it spreads out in a smudgy sort of way and the find detail goes. I can’t use the pad I usually use as it isn’t big enough, anyway the rest of the day was spent destruction testing some very expensive sheets of paper.



The good thing about this spot is that you can’t really photograph what you can see from it. Obviously the pillars are vertical which is what your eyes see, the camera however can’t cope with this or the spot lights on the pillars.   

Funny business painting the inside of Canterbury Cathedral, for one thing you periodically get asked to go because another part is being used for god bothering on the one hand and on the other hand it feels like painting it is the right thing to be doing. Despite the tourists, the noise, the flash photography… the building retains some sort of mystical atmosphere, which seems to me to be related to this.

On well “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”


So the question is, do I carry on with this watercolour of Canterbury cathedral or do I start another one on different paper? I only hope the building doesn’t attempt to communicate its wishes in a cadence of draughty cloisters, I certainly won’t be doing any pillar hugging.

Just checked my bookshop’s blog, see http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/shannara-in-bookshop.html to see what went out on the shelves in my absence and there were a lot of books I have read and can recommend in the post including Noddy, Garth Nix, Inkspell, the usual scattering  of Kentish local history, there was also a Le Carre which I am not going to admit to not being able to understand.


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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.