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Stephen Felstead’s route to becoming an artist has been unusual to say the least. Leaving school at an early age with no qualifications he took a variety of jobs including lifeguard on Bournemouth beach, working as crew on dredgers and inshore cargo boats, sports centre assistant and even a spell in Coldstream Guards. However it was in 1990 that he came for a week’s holiday in West Cornwall and has never returned to his native Hampshire. He bought a 16-foot open boat, named it Little Seal and learned the skills of inshore fishing the hard way. He fished out of Mousehole, hand lining for mackerel, long lining for conger eel, netting for bass and jigging for squid during the winter months. When inshore fishing was lean he took berths on various netters and trawlers working out of Newlyn. The tales are endless, amusing to relate now but some not so at the time. One winter he borrowed a 21 foot boat which could take more weather only to break down on November 5th in a south easterly near gale, so close to shore that the locals in Mousehole thought that his flares were fireworks. After a long story a Newlyn boat towed him in. 10 miles off the Isles of Scilly on a three-handed netter helicopters, divers, pumps, Sennen Lifeboat all played a hand in ensuring that the Belle Bretagne plus crew safely returned to Newlyn. On a lighter note, as a ‘new boy’ his understanding of the older Cornish fisherman at times left a lot to be desired. Returning from the Seaman’s Mission with cups of tea for the crew he felt somewhat foolish when it was pointed out that he had in fact been asked to “raise the mizzen, we are going to sea”! He has however the greatest respect for some of these men and feels privileged to have fished along side them. Sadly many of the gill netters Stephen sailed on have been decommissioned and broken up. In 1995 he could see the way fishing was going, sold his boat and moved, with his wife and small daughter to Devon. However, rod fishing off Paignton harbour he met a local fisherman and within a week was flying from Exeter to Guernsey to join a super crabber. Working 4000 pots a day (the average crabber in Newlyn works between 500 and 1500 a day) for a skipper who proved a hard man Stephen recalls walking down the quay in the early hours with the wind howling around him looking forward to a day off only to be greeted with the skipper shouting to him to let go of the ropes. At the age of 40 Stephen realised that this was a young man’s job, and on returning from these trips, resting after a visit to the Osteopath who was putting his shoulders back together in order to do another trip he took up his hobby of sketching again. It was at this time that he discovered pastels and, remembering the brightly coloured fishing boats in the Channel Islands he began to draw them. He returned to Cornwall in 1997 and again found himself drawn to Newlyn and joined a crabber. The rewards were practically nil and so when he sold his first painting he followed his instincts that told him he could succeed as an artist. He now realizes that during all the years working at sea he had been absorbing the colours, movement, and many moods of the sea from a raging gale to peaceful flat calm all culminating in the atmospheric seascapes he now paints and sells from his gallery in Penzance. |
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