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Page 1 of 5 Max Lui takes a redemptive walk through St Ives in the footsteps of Alfred Wallis In Primitive, the classic study of the naïve painter Alfred Wallis, Sven Berlin writes of a St Ives where there is ‘tier upon tier of seining ships in the harbour and the streets smell of fish rather than fish and chips.’ Wallis endures as a compelling icon because, as with his paintings, his life manifests at once the inanity and injustice of St Ives and its wonder and integrity. Dismissed by neighbours as a spinner of yarns and a madman with an acute persecution complex, he began painting in 1925 ‘for company’ following the death of his wife and careers as a fisherman and rag and bone merchant.  Porthmeor Cemetery where Alfred Wallis was laid to rest. Photo by Emily Davis. A deeply religious man who called his bible ‘my chart to heaven’, it is fitting that Wallis’ triumph is the triumph of afterlife. The immortality he sought through religion has been achieved in art and his position as one of St Ives’ most celebrated sons is marked for all time by his Porthmeor Cemetery grave designed by Bernard Leach. The grave, commissioned by a group of artists, saved Wallis from the pauper’s burial he feared all his life. I managed to walk past it every day for 20 years without noticing until, as a homesick student in Manchester, I saw a photograph in a book about Wallis. Artist & Mariner reads the inscription above a picture of the old man walking up the steps of a lighthouse, its beams beating across a bay of golden desolation. Beautiful, moving and redemptive, Leach depicts Wallis, ‘lighting the way for those who will come after’. Today, the light is impossibly white, bouncing off the cottage fronts of Back Road West where for at least a decade the sound of chisels and drills and the sight of scaffolding have been as constant as the clog of unloading vans, scooters, and tourists looking for the Tate. Surfer’s footprints are wet on the tarmac. |
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