Alfred Wallis - painter
Alfred Wallis’ (1855-1942) paintings seem to have emerged from an unknown, unexpected world, where nature is brutally neutral, where the sky is impenetrable and the headlands are brittle. They’re from a world focussed around the subjectivity of the boat, that in Wallis is human, and yet alien, surrounded by hallucinatory seas that vary widely across Wallis’ oeuvre.
I remember looking at one of Alfred Wallis’ paintings in Kettle’s Yard last year, and my grandma saying ‘it’s so real’. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, and agreed, and we moved on. Sitting down to write this article, I wonder why we agreed that ‘real’ was a suitable word, of all words, to describe Wallis’ work. I think that the word ‘real’ doesn’t get to the bottom of these paintings, but our inclination to use it shows us something important about the way we see them. It shows us a problem with our appreciation of Wallis as an artist who is always qualified with reference to his background in the working-class.
It is true, these abstract images of boats and harbours were painted by someone who had ‘really’ spent his life in those boats and on those harbours. They were imagined by someone who ‘really’ knew a Cornish life. A life unimaginable to those who have tried to find parking in today’s Tripadvisor hotspots. They were painted by someone who was from the ‘real’ world, far removed from the pretension and theory of the art world in urban centres across the UK. Wallis started painting after the death of his wife, working for 8 years before he was ‘discovered’ by a holidaying William Nicholson, without any desire for fame. He explained after that he started painting ‘for company’, never dreaming he would be championed by Nicholson and others in the London art world.
These works are not by someone who rode out from the coffee house to lodge in a manor house, taking a turn after tea to a stream with an easel, to paint Nature, all the while thinking of the Turners in the London galleries. They were painted from a ‘real’ place, we are tempted to say.
And this sense captivated those in the art world of London, as well as my grandma and I. For bourgeois artists, Wallis represented the ‘naive’ style, the ability to see things as they ‘really’ were, to capture their exact essence in an undesigned and spontaneous way; Wallis’ work had an authenticity that these artists were desperate for. They fetished the world they saw in his paintings, as if they somehow gave them access to a ‘real’ world. Wallis’ abstract paintings justified their own experiments, and his paintings were admired in an uncomfortably performative way. ‘Look!’, you can almost hear them say, ‘Bear in mind: completely untrained! And a fisherman!’
Looking back, I think that using the word ‘real’ does Wallis a disservice. Wallis’ paintings should not be consigned to some extra-territorial ‘real’, outside the domain normal art, they should be considered in their own right. Wallis was an inspiring person, deserving of praise and admiration, but it seems wrong that appreciation of Wallis is almost always contextualised in his biography: it alienates him from the community of ‘normal’ artists. It smacks of the bourgeois fetish for the working class, born from an anxious realisation of privilege and ignorance; admiration for Wallis always seems to be prefaced by a reminder that he was untrained and poor, and the fetishisation of his paintings always seems to be inextricably linked to this demographic.
In fact, Wallis was painting the world of his dream - drawing on the memory of the time of the sailboat in the time of the dominance of the steamship. His paintings were nostalgic, odes to the world he knew when he completed his journeys from Cornwall to Newfoundland. In them so much is obscure - enormous fish encircle boats, the carapace of life surrounded by murky and illegible landscapes. Streets are stacked on top of one another, and boats in the harbour find their orientation not from the perspective of the eye, but, in one painting, from their orientation to their place of mooring - their perspective is decided by their functional existence and not from the place of the observer.
But what the boat meant to Wallis I can never pretend to know. We can never seek to grasp how real it was for him by looking in his paintings and describing them as ‘real’. The filter of his medium - his five colors - the driftwood and cardboard he gathered from the debris of St Ives and used as his canvases, are fragments of an existence that we can only admire from the other side of a boundary, one that we cannot pretend to see through.
In fact, it is how unreal his works seem, that seem to hold some knowledge that they cannot disclose, rather than how real, that makes them so tantalising. Wallis was a unique and inspiring artist, whose influence on abstract painting in the 20th century was significant, and that is all the information that should be necessary to appreciate his work.