Motor Vessel near Land - Alfred Wallis

A characteristic maritime scene by Alfred Wallis, featuring a motor vessel navigating coastal waters, rendered in his signature naïve style on cardboard.

Alfred Wallis, a retired Cornish fisherman, began painting in his late sixties following the death of his wife. Working primarily on salvaged cardboard scraps and discarded packaging, he utilised the materials available to him in St Ives. His approach to composition ignores traditional perspective, favouring a flattened, map-like arrangement where the relative size of objects is determined by their importance to the narrative rather than their distance from the viewer.

In this work, a motor vessel occupies the centre of the frame, rendered with simple, direct brushwork. The sea is depicted as a textured, grey mass that surrounds the ship, while a large, green landmass looms on the right. Wallis often used limited palettes, frequently relying on household paints, which accounts for the muted, earthy tones seen here. The signature 'A WALLIS' appears in the upper right, a common feature of his output. His work is characterised by a lack of formal training, which allowed him to capture the essence of maritime life with an immediacy that appealed to the St Ives group of artists, including Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who discovered his work in 1928.

This piece reflects the artist's deep familiarity with the Cornish coast and the vessels that navigated its waters. The irregular shape of the cardboard, often cut or torn by the artist, remains a defining feature of his aesthetic. By painting directly onto these found surfaces, Wallis created objects that feel inseparable from the environment they depict. His output remains a significant example of self-taught expression within the British modernist tradition, offering a view of the sea that is both personal and immediate.