Alfred Wallis was seventy years old when he first picked up a brush and started to paint. Recently widowed, he was as lonely as the lighthouses that recur in so many of his works. He called his paintings ‘company’.
He had lived by the sea and from the sea. For the greater part of his life he was a fisherman and mariner, sailing across the North Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland.
His paintings, the grand flowering of his final years, are naive in style but profoundly expressive of his love and knowledge of his native St Ives, of its coastline and customs.
The artist Ben Nicholson, who, along with Christopher Wood, discovered Wallis stressed that for this fisherman / artist, so steeped as he was in the life of the sea: ‘his paintings were never ‘paintings’ but actual events.’
Combining innocence and experience, they remind me of a quote from another great artist Paul Klee: ‘I want to paint as a child – but a wise child’.
