Margate, Kent; looking South West, 13:00, 17th March 2015

It was my birthday yesterday, and to celebrate it, we drove down to Margate, because I’d never been there and because it’s on a corner. The weather was warm with the first hints of spring, so we sat outside and ate fish and chips for lunch and then had a beer at the pub on the pier. There was a slight mist which diffused the light spilling across the beach from the south west and caused everything to gradually dissolve into the distance. You could see where Turner (a onetime resident of the town) got it from…

Also there’s the Turner Contemporary Gallery whose main exhibition until May is based around artist’s self-portraits since van Dyck. It’s a larger exhibition than I expected and so we were a bit rushed, what with all the looking at the light and eating fish and chips and walking on sand in diffused sunshine that we’d been doing, but I found myself quite taken by the 3 large photographs from Trish Morrissey’s series “Front” all featuring the artist, but with her posing as one of the members of a family group that she’d come across on a beach. She describes the process in much more depth than I have in the Guardian article on the other end of the link, above, illustrated with one of the pictures that’s on show in Margate.

I’ll have a closer look at the series, I think; the idea intrigues me. For now though, I’ll file it away until I have more time for non-TAoP-related thinking.

* – Sotherby’s Freak Out (n) – A concept coined by my friends Sean and Dave, more than 30 years ago to describe the sudden experience of confronting a view which had all the characteristics of a painting by someone with a distinct style of their own. In this case, Turner.