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This is the story of Cornish fisherman-turned-artist Alfred Wallis, whose paintings of boats from his past inspired the future of British modern art. Told from Wallis' perspective - inspired by his crudely written letters to Jim Ede - this book takes the reader through his remarkable life; his early sailing days, his late arrival to painting, his encounters with 'proper' artists and his battle with mental health. Wallis' naïve yet poignant work has captured the imagination of many. His paintings are a portal into Wallis' world of ships, boats and the sea; and his deep concern for preserving 'what used to be'.
Wallis was a semi-literate Cornish fisherman, a little mentally unbalanced and largely deaf, who took up painting at the age of seventy, never having received any tuition. He painted largely out of loneliness, selling his pictures for a few pence to anyone who wanted them. He died in a workhouse above Penzance at the age of eighty-seven. Wallis used to paint old scraps of cardboard, most of them oddly shaped and supplied by the local grocer. He insisted on using ship s paint, a medium which he understood, and he employed very few colours. His subject was usually the sea and boats - scenes he had known during his early days as an Atlantic seaman and offshore fisherman. Painting was for him a dip into the memories of the past. Despite his lack of training, during his lifetime Wallis had a few distinguished patrons, for the most part artists, scholars and museum officials, among whom were Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and H. S. Ede (then at the Tate Gallery)."
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One of a series exploring the life and work of major artists associated with St Ives, this study of Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) sets out to revise previous accounts of his life in the light of new research. It also discusses the gradual development of his painting over 17 years of activity.
- Kettle's Yard, the University of Cambridge's modern and contemporary art gallery, holds the largest public collection of works by Alfred Wallis Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) is one of the most original and inspiring British artists of the 20th Century. Promoted by the artist Ben Nicholson amongst others, Wallis's paintings influenced the development of British art between the wars. The directness of Wallis' vision reflected a lifetime of living by and from the sea. His paintings are of what he knew, remembered and imagined. Yet they are also timeless stories about survival and the nature of our relationship with the world. As Jim Ede commented "Wallis is never local." With over 70 illustration...
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On a visit to St. Ives in the 1920s, the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood chanced upon a reclusive, semi-literate fisherman living in poverty and spending his time, when not reading the family Bible, in painting pictures on odd scraps of board. The old man was Alfred Wallis and he became an icon of the modernist movement in Britain. Despite being the darling of the cognoscenti, Wallis died in a Penzance workhouse in 1942, and Sven Berlin's passionate plea for the more sympathetic treatment of the old and infirm, published in Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine shortly after Wallis' death, is reproduced here for the first time. Also available: Britains Art Colony by the Sea - ISBN 1900178133 - $19.95
Since his death in 1942, St Ives has become marinated in the spirit of the naive painter, Alfred Wallis. Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist, felt that Wallis's gift as an artist was that he never knew he was one. His unconventional approach and the innocence of his personal method of making art marked Alfred Wallis, even after his death, as a crucial figure in the modernist movement. The art scene in St Ives during World War II is depicted vividly in The Alfred Wallis Factor which illustrates the birth of modernism in the small fishing port in the far south-west of England. With dominant personalities like Sven Berlin, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Adrian Stokes, Bernard Leach, Terry F...