A year ago, art gallery owner Tabby Booth was scrolling through eBay when a painting of a whale caught her eye.
“I wasn’t even browsing for work,” said Booth, who set up the Sailors Jail gallery in Falmouth, Cornwall, with her husband, James Heslip, in 2023. “It was just for my own interest. But there was something about these whale pictures that felt really special, and the artist was from Newquay.
“Our USP as a gallery is to promote Cornish artists so we decided to go and visit him.”
They found Steve Camps ensconced in his workshop overlooking the surfer’s paradise of Fistral beach, a retired former builder sitting at the centre of what Booth described as an “Aladdin’s cave” of old picture frames, vintage art and whale paintings.
They took away 15 of his distinctive, deceptively simple paintings and put them on sale in the gallery, ranging from £20 for the smaller ones to £100 for the largest.
Camps was delighted; he had been happy enough with the few quid he’d got for selling a handful of unsigned pictures online. But the best was yet to come. “Within a week the paintings had all gone,” said Booth. “We had to get more from him, and we knew we had to put the prices up.”
A year later, people can’t get enough of Camps’s whales. He does a drop of new paintings about once a month to Sailors Jail, which exclusively sells his work for about £2,500 a piece. Booth now acts as his agent.
By the time last weekend’s batch had been hung in the gallery and priced, they had all sold online and had to be taken down again.
Camps is slightly flummoxed by it all, not least by the prices his paintings are fetching. It’s a decent unexpected pension, to say the least, for a man who had never put brush to canvas before he retired.
“I think I’ve had about £140,000 so far,” he said, sounding as if he hardly believes it himself.
Camps has no formal art training. He left school at 16 to become a painter and decorator, and later became a builder, working around Newquay, which he did until retirement.
In fact, he’d never even shown an interest in painting. “I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a collector,” he said. “Stamps, things like that, but I never really found the thing that grabbed me until I found some old paintings by a local artist, and bought them on the spur of the moment.”
Camps slowly amassed a collection of largely unknown artists, sometimes selling them on through local auction houses, more often just keeping and restoring the frames in his workshop. When he retired at the beginning of last year, he and his partner, Sue, embarked upon a series of coach holidays across the UK.
In Llandudno, north Wales, he saw two paintings in the window of a charity shop. “They were quite unusual in style,” he said. “They were ships, they must have been whaling ships, because there were whales on the back of them.”
The pictures stirred something in Camps, and when he got home he sat down in his workshop and started to paint. He didn’t even have any proper art materials or paint.
“I just used normal emulsion, which I still do,” he said. “I was quite pleased with the results and decided to put them in the vintage frames I had, and stuck them on eBay with some other paintings I’d bought. I think I made about £120, which I was more than happy with.”
Last month’s pay cheque for his art was in the region of £20,000, with paintings selling across the world, especially in the US. Camps, who has three children and three grandchildren said: “It’s just crazy. I honestly can’t get my head around it.”
Booth is, of course, equally delighted. “He’s basically an authentic outsider artist, with no training, no connections in the art world,” she said. “His work has naiveté and character. There’s a very folk art feel about it, a whimsical element. And he frames each piece himself with one of his vintage frames, which adds to the uniqueness.”
From Camps’s workshop, he can see picturesque Fistral beach, the waves dotted with surfers. And perhaps, on the Atlantic horizon, the odd whale, for inspiration?
“I’ve never seen a real whale in my life,” he said. “We went on a bit of a cruise from Falmouth once and there were meant to be whales out at sea, but we never spotted any.”
