s North Sea Incident - Hull Museums Collections

North Sea Incident

Chesterman was born in India and as a child also lived in Australia prior to settling in England. Having started out as a farmer he eventually pursued his artistic interests as a mature student at both Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He went on to teach at Leeds College of Art for 30 years. Chesterman had a solo show at the Ferens in 1999 from which this painting was acquired. Boats are the subject of many of his paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture. North Sea Incident captures the awesome scale of a tanker in dry dock. Chesterman has said that, 'ships on land are a bit like a house at sea…boats operate between air and water. On land they seem curiously tense.' The size and power of the tanker has been heightened by the inclusion of a cluster of tiny paper boats bobbing in the water at the bottom of the picture. North Sea Incident refers to the 1904 shelling of a flotilla of Hull trawlers by a Russian fleet, who mistook it for a Japanese submarine. People were killed and many boats sank. The small paper boats that float vulnerably alongside the huge tanker are symbolic of this incident.