Fishing Shanties

 

Reading this many blogs about our PEI trip must be like looking at somebodies vacation photos when they took too many of them! You know that feeling, when you are stuck in a living room flipping through 300 photos or worse yet seeing them on a big screen TV with no polite way to escape. At least on the internet you can just go to another web page and it wont hurt my feelings! This was one of the last of the shanty paintings, I decided to show the rustic textures and colours here, with stacks of rectangular lobster traps and other fishing gear containers.

Turquoise and rustic red shanties, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024

 

Going back to the beginning of the trip, this was the first painting of a shanty. They are not complex structures, however, the white trim can be hard to capture in watercolour paint. Some of the local fisherman saw me painting and dropped by to take a look, they seemed to be impressed. I should have traded a painting for a fish, that would have been a neat story.

Green shanty, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024

 

In this view, the shanties are placed in their environment, surrounded by water and electrical wires. There were more than a dozen similar structures all along the fishing dock. Many of the vessels were set up for commercial deep sea fishing, where tourists could pay to go catch a fish or two. It must be lucrative because there were a dozen or more such boats. 

Pair of shanties, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 

Each shanty belongs to a fisherman, and they can choose to decorate it in a unique way. Most of them were made from wood paneling, while some had the more traditional wooden shingles that are common around the area including on residential homes. Lobster was clearly the reason of living here, so perhaps they take tourists out in the off season and set lobster traps during lobster season. Hundreds of traps were stacked up along the row of shanties, some traps were semi-circular half cylinders, other were rectangular boxes. You could also buy an old trap for ten bucks for a decoration.

Colourful shanties, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024