Billy Anderson of Rockland made the transition from deep-sea fisherman to artist with composure when he retired. He made it seem easy in his new career, because inside, it was something he had wanted since he was a boy growing up in his native Port Clyde.
“I was a lobsterman when I was 12, with my own boat. I had 30 traps,” he said in a recent interview at the home on Grace Street, Rockland, where he lives with his wife, Cynthia, a retired registered nurse, and Fozzick, a mixed breed of Highland terrier and poodle.
At 77, Anderson combines a life of retirement with his new career as a painter, mostly of the nautical life he knew as a fisherman.
“I went fishing on an offshore trawler from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland to New Jersey and New York for 47 years,” Anderson said. “We would go out with a nine-man crew and fish 260 days a year.
“I was the youngest mate on vessels for a lot of years,” he said.
He also served in the Navy from 1959 to 1961 and worked for the Maine State Ferry Service near the end of his time at sea, in 2000.
Anderson’s paintings of boats, old wharves, the rocks along the Maine coast and work on boats of what he calls “the old culture” of fishing adorn his walls and the walls of many of his friends and family. He says he wants to capture a way of life before it disappears, owing to new technology in the fishing industry.
“This town was a fishing community,” he said of Port Clyde.
“We used to bring in 350,000 pounds of fish, and the seas would break over the rails,” he said. “That way of life is all gone,” he added, attributing the changes to technology and greed.
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