<p>Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) was a most unlikely artist. A fisherman who remained close to the sea all his life, he took up painting when he was 70. <br /><br /></p>.<p>Wallis’s life story is interesting. Born to a poor family in Devonport, near Plymouth, he claimed to have gone to sea aged nine for deep-sea fishing. In his youth, he lived on a shipboard, working as a cook and cabin boy. At 20, he got married to Susan Ward who was 23 years older to him and a widowed mother. When he was 35, he moved his family from Plymouth to the port town, St Ives. There he opened a successful business and spent the next 20 years as a marine scrap dealer, buying and selling iron, sails and rope. In 1894, he was arrested and fined 10 pounds for trading illegally salvaged brass from a local shipwreck.<br /><br />His business closed in 1912 following the decline of the fishing fleet. Wallis worked for the next 10 years on odd jobs for a local antiques dealer; at one time, he is supposed to have even made and sold ice cream!<br /><br />Following his wife’s death in 1922, he took up painting ‘for company’. Poor, semi-literate and reclusive in his 70s, he taught himself to paint ostensibly to overcome loneliness and boredom. He was encouraged by three local shopkeepers, one of whom was a local grocer who supplied bits of cardboard for him to paint on.<br /><br />Chance meeting<br /><br />In August 1928, Willis’s life took an unexpected turn when Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Christopher Wood (1901-1930), both established artists, met him in St Ives. That chance meeting between the London-based artists and the poor fisherman painting on a kitchen table in his ramshackle hut is hailed as one of the great milestones in 20th century British art. <br /><br />Both Nicholson and Wood were taken in by Willis’s colourful, if naïve, paintings in which they saw the erstwhile mariner’s immediacy, raw directedness and uninhibited power of expression. Instantly they became his ardent admirers and thanks to their efforts, Wallis’s paintings began attracting attention in London. Art collector Jim Ede was among the early and enthusiastic supporters of Wallis’s art. In course of time, he bought over 120 paintings. Both Wallis and Ede corresponded regularly for almost a decade from 1929. Willis’s naïve and primitive style also attracted the attention of art historian Herbert Read, art critic Adrian Stokes, and sculptress Barbara Hepworth. <br /><br />In March 1937, Wallis was hit by a car, an incident which triggered a steady decline in his mental and physical health. Even as he continued to work, he developed a persecution mania; and became increasingly isolated. Leading a tormented existence and in dire poverty, he moved to the Madron workhouse in 1941. There he resumed painting for what was the remaining 14 months of his life. When he died on August 29, 1942, he was 86.<br /><br />Innocence & imagination<br /><br />Wallis was known to be a religious man who painted everyday except Sunday. A self-confessed ‘Biblekeeper’, he deemed it as ‘everyone’s duty’ to read the Bible everyday. A prolific painter, he supposedly painted over 4,000 paintings in the last 16 years of his life. <br /><br />Wallis’s exceptional talent shone through his basic palette, simple materials and a child-like innocence and imagination. His principal subjects were ships on water, fishing boats on stormy seas, and shipwrecks. He also painted landscapes with lighthouses, trees, houses, birds in gardens and iron bridges, but rarely depicted people. He used very few colours, and seemed to be fond of dark browns, shiny blacks, greys, and greens. He never cared to use artist’s paints – preferring ordinary household or ship’s leftover paint. He painted on whatever scrap of material came his way, including bits of cardboard ripped from packing boxes, found wood, trunk lids and back of cigarette packets. <br /><br />Critics have pointed how Wallis’s paintings are truly naive, totally untutored and uninhibited; and how the most striking feature of his art was an apparent disregard for perspective. The scale of objects in his paintings was based on their relative importance in the scene rather than on their size. If he painted a big fish beneath a ship, it was because “each boat has a soul, a beautiful soul shaped like a fish, so the fish I’ve painted aren’t fish at all, you wouldn’t be any good without a soul, would’ee?”<br /><br />Wallis also spoke of painting from memory. His letters to Ede reveal a great deal about his approach to painting. “What I do mosley (mostly) is what use to Be out of my own memery (memory) what we may never see again as Thing are altered all together,” he once wrote. “I do not go out any where to Draw.” He was also averse to using colours where they did not belong because “I Think i spoils the pictures Their have Been a lot of paintins (paintings) spoiled By putin collers (putting colours) where they do not Blong (belong).”<br /><br />Ede continued to be devoted to Wallis’s art. In 1945, three years after the artist’s death, he wrote: “Though he is always drawing the same ships, the same houses, the same water, each of Wallis’s pictures is a new experience... His mood, the thing which made him want to paint, to tell himself as it were some past memory, dictates the composition... It is the immediate welling up of his vision, rich in actual experience. It is experience which enables us to do things rightly, and the use of experience which gives colour to our action.”<br /><br />Wallis, whose work affected a whole generation of British modernists, was not to be forgotten easily. In his introduction to the 1968 Arts Council touring exhibition of Alfred Wallis, art historian and museum director Sir Alan Bowness wrote: “Wallis shows such an easy natural mastery of colour and forms that one can only look with delight and astonishment. It must be enough to make the ‘real’ artists (which Wallis always said he was not) despair.”</p>
<p>Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) was a most unlikely artist. A fisherman who remained close to the sea all his life, he took up painting when he was 70. <br /><br /></p>.<p>Wallis’s life story is interesting. Born to a poor family in Devonport, near Plymouth, he claimed to have gone to sea aged nine for deep-sea fishing. In his youth, he lived on a shipboard, working as a cook and cabin boy. At 20, he got married to Susan Ward who was 23 years older to him and a widowed mother. When he was 35, he moved his family from Plymouth to the port town, St Ives. There he opened a successful business and spent the next 20 years as a marine scrap dealer, buying and selling iron, sails and rope. In 1894, he was arrested and fined 10 pounds for trading illegally salvaged brass from a local shipwreck.<br /><br />His business closed in 1912 following the decline of the fishing fleet. Wallis worked for the next 10 years on odd jobs for a local antiques dealer; at one time, he is supposed to have even made and sold ice cream!<br /><br />Following his wife’s death in 1922, he took up painting ‘for company’. Poor, semi-literate and reclusive in his 70s, he taught himself to paint ostensibly to overcome loneliness and boredom. He was encouraged by three local shopkeepers, one of whom was a local grocer who supplied bits of cardboard for him to paint on.<br /><br />Chance meeting<br /><br />In August 1928, Willis’s life took an unexpected turn when Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Christopher Wood (1901-1930), both established artists, met him in St Ives. That chance meeting between the London-based artists and the poor fisherman painting on a kitchen table in his ramshackle hut is hailed as one of the great milestones in 20th century British art. <br /><br />Both Nicholson and Wood were taken in by Willis’s colourful, if naïve, paintings in which they saw the erstwhile mariner’s immediacy, raw directedness and uninhibited power of expression. Instantly they became his ardent admirers and thanks to their efforts, Wallis’s paintings began attracting attention in London. Art collector Jim Ede was among the early and enthusiastic supporters of Wallis’s art. In course of time, he bought over 120 paintings. Both Wallis and Ede corresponded regularly for almost a decade from 1929. Willis’s naïve and primitive style also attracted the attention of art historian Herbert Read, art critic Adrian Stokes, and sculptress Barbara Hepworth. <br /><br />In March 1937, Wallis was hit by a car, an incident which triggered a steady decline in his mental and physical health. Even as he continued to work, he developed a persecution mania; and became increasingly isolated. Leading a tormented existence and in dire poverty, he moved to the Madron workhouse in 1941. There he resumed painting for what was the remaining 14 months of his life. When he died on August 29, 1942, he was 86.<br /><br />Innocence & imagination<br /><br />Wallis was known to be a religious man who painted everyday except Sunday. A self-confessed ‘Biblekeeper’, he deemed it as ‘everyone’s duty’ to read the Bible everyday. A prolific painter, he supposedly painted over 4,000 paintings in the last 16 years of his life. <br /><br />Wallis’s exceptional talent shone through his basic palette, simple materials and a child-like innocence and imagination. His principal subjects were ships on water, fishing boats on stormy seas, and shipwrecks. He also painted landscapes with lighthouses, trees, houses, birds in gardens and iron bridges, but rarely depicted people. He used very few colours, and seemed to be fond of dark browns, shiny blacks, greys, and greens. He never cared to use artist’s paints – preferring ordinary household or ship’s leftover paint. He painted on whatever scrap of material came his way, including bits of cardboard ripped from packing boxes, found wood, trunk lids and back of cigarette packets. <br /><br />Critics have pointed how Wallis’s paintings are truly naive, totally untutored and uninhibited; and how the most striking feature of his art was an apparent disregard for perspective. The scale of objects in his paintings was based on their relative importance in the scene rather than on their size. If he painted a big fish beneath a ship, it was because “each boat has a soul, a beautiful soul shaped like a fish, so the fish I’ve painted aren’t fish at all, you wouldn’t be any good without a soul, would’ee?”<br /><br />Wallis also spoke of painting from memory. His letters to Ede reveal a great deal about his approach to painting. “What I do mosley (mostly) is what use to Be out of my own memery (memory) what we may never see again as Thing are altered all together,” he once wrote. “I do not go out any where to Draw.” He was also averse to using colours where they did not belong because “I Think i spoils the pictures Their have Been a lot of paintins (paintings) spoiled By putin collers (putting colours) where they do not Blong (belong).”<br /><br />Ede continued to be devoted to Wallis’s art. In 1945, three years after the artist’s death, he wrote: “Though he is always drawing the same ships, the same houses, the same water, each of Wallis’s pictures is a new experience... His mood, the thing which made him want to paint, to tell himself as it were some past memory, dictates the composition... It is the immediate welling up of his vision, rich in actual experience. It is experience which enables us to do things rightly, and the use of experience which gives colour to our action.”<br /><br />Wallis, whose work affected a whole generation of British modernists, was not to be forgotten easily. In his introduction to the 1968 Arts Council touring exhibition of Alfred Wallis, art historian and museum director Sir Alan Bowness wrote: “Wallis shows such an easy natural mastery of colour and forms that one can only look with delight and astonishment. It must be enough to make the ‘real’ artists (which Wallis always said he was not) despair.”</p>
