Alfred Wallis (1855-1942)

Wallis settled on the perfect medium and support for his work early on; he used pencil and household paint on scrapped cardboard boxes. The paints, readily available but only in limited colours, were usually black and white, blue, green, with perhaps a little yellow and red. The dense cardboard of packing boxes absorbed the paint quickly achieving the desired matt effect. The shape of the card was also important to Wallis. He would cut out the card from the box, often deliberately creating irregular shapes which would then define the form of the painting. The trimming of the corners in particular, as in the present work, was a favourite modification.