Page 34 - Studio International - November 1966

central images, usually a house, a boat or a bridge, that
were particularly important to him. Subsidiary images
would then be added, usually much smaller in scale, in
the manner of a decorative fringe arranged to fill in the
remaining space and complete the design. The numerous
paintings he did of the town of St Ives, for example,
usually centre on a curious-shaped house which stands in
Porthmeor Square a few yards from his own cottage. This
house is invariably depicted from the same angle, but the
rest of St Ives is always compressed and re-arranged
round it, with quite different backgrounds, depending
entirely on what he intended to emphasize. And in
some of the finest of his sea-paintings a ship in full sail is
placed right in the centre of the picture, with the shore—a
subsidiary image—diverted round and above it as though
out of respect for the ship. Each picture, therefore, has its
own design, and each design explains clearly what the
artist was trying to do.
It was fortuitous that the only materials available for
Wallis to paint on were, in general, irregular-shaped
scraps of cardboard which the grocer would save up for
him. What is to me extraordinary is that, instead of
neatly squaring these up, as most painters would prob-
ably do automatically, Wallis made the irregularity of
these odd scraps with their frayed edges contribute to the
design he was creating. In fact he often 'improved' their
irregularity with the aid of a pair of scissors.
Furthermore, he used the natural colours of the card-
board, too, frequently keying a picture to its brown,
pink, green, or white surface, much of which he would
leave deliberately unpainted, especially the areas round
an important image, as though to isolate and emphasize
it. 'i thought it not nessery to paint it all around so i
never Don it', he wrote to Ede in 1929. In one picture he
even made use of the four bright-red corners of an old
blotter which he happened to be painting on. And when
he did apply his own colours he did so very sparingly,
using only ship's paint, never artists' oils, in a strictly
limited range of—mostly—browns, greys, greens, and
whites: `i do not put Collers what do not Belong', he
wrote in a trenchant letter to Ede in 1935, `i Think it
spoils The pictures Their have Been a lot of paintins
spoiled By putin Collers where They do not Blong....'
Top Railway Bridge—possibly was never in the least interested in painting pretty He was right, too. Wallis could see better than others
a distant recollection of
Brunel's Saltash Bridge, pictures. what a colourful Impressionist mess the academic painters
built when Wallis was a boy. It Many of the explanatory titles, too, which Wallis wrote of St Ives were making of the picturesque harbour and its
is a recurrent theme in his on his paintings, suggest exactly the same approach. A little boats.
work. (Collection: Adrian
Stokes.) landscape with numerous animals bears this quaint in- Apart from the sea- and harbour-paintings and the
scription on the back : 'Their was a donkey sold by townscapes, I would like to touch on two other themes
Lion and Saltash Bridge Aucton fetched 2000 pounds ad stripes like one duren which recur in Wallis's work: the forest, and the giant
(Collection: Dr J. P. Hodin.)
The war i Saw very scarce To see one with stripes.' bridge. Nothing in Wallis is more child-like—more
Written round the edge of another are the words, 'This 'primitive' —than the way he painted trees. He sets them
is a quary of granet'; while in a letter to Ede accompany- down on the ground like great black skittles sprouting
ing a bundle of paintings Wallis explains, of one of his hundreds of stiff little arms. Clearly what impressed him
pictures, that 'The Big one is from St Ives down to Lands about trees was how their dark massiveness could be-
End and long ships 3 mile off from The Lands End'. little the houses and people beneath them; also how a
Wallis at his best possessed two remarkable natural forest could become a secret and magic garden full of
gifts: for composition and for colour. He never composed birds, animals, and flowers. His simple way of covering
a picture by setting down what he saw before him. a tree with white dots for blossom conveys with enchant-
Wallis worked from memory Call i do is bout of my mery' ing naturalness the feeling of spring.
[i.e. 'memory] he wrote to Ede), always indoors on a The giant bridge is a more peculiar theme. Wallis
flat table-top, building a painting up round one or more appears to have been obsessed by it, and, to judge from
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