A SPECIAL charity art show is set to take centre stage all this month at a popular gallery.

Benefiting the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, the charity exhibition by professional marine artist Jeremy Rugge-Price will take place at the Ferini Art Gallery in Pakefield.

And tomorrow (July 2), Waveney MP Peter Aldous will join Mr Rugge-Price and Tim Jenkins from the Fishermen's Mission in Lowestoft for a preview of the exhibition, which runs all this month.

With a percentage of sales from the artist's work going to the Fishermen's Mission, Mr Rugge-Price is a self taught artist, whose career began 20 years ago in Camden, Maine.

After 35 years in the USA he now lives in Orford, Suffolk where much of his youth was spent and where he first learned to sail back in 1949.

This exhibition highlights the dangers, difficulties and ongoing demise of the fishing industry in the coastal waters around the UK, the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia and the Bering Sea off the Coast of Alaska.

'Over the course of my lifetime I have encountered, the world of fishermen and the perilous lives they lead,' he said. 'As a young man I spent three years in the Merchant Navy on an ocean going cargo ship, I experienced first hand the power of the ocean when aroused,' he added.

'For the last 35 years I have sailed of the coast of Maine, amongst the fishing boats and lobstermen that ply those waters.

'My aim with money raised from the sale of these paintings is to help the fishermen and their families and to thank them for their sacrifices,' he said.