Houses at St Ives, Cornwall c. 1928 - 1942

Editor: This is Alfred Wallis’s "Houses at St Ives, Cornwall." I’m struck by how the houses seem to be almost floating on the surface. What can you tell me about this piece? Curator: Wallis, a Cornish fisherman turned artist, offers us a perspective deeply intertwined with labor and place. The distorted perspective, almost childlike, challenges conventional representation. How do you think his working-class background informs his artistic vision? Editor: I guess it's a very personal viewpoint, and perhaps naive in its aesthetic. It makes me wonder what he was trying to convey. Curator: Perhaps it's less about conveying and more about reclaiming. Wallis presents St. Ives not as a picturesque scene for tourists, but as a lived space marked by the realities of maritime life and its precarity. There's a quiet resistance in his refusal to cater to bourgeois expectations. Editor: That’s fascinating. I hadn't considered the act of painting itself as a form of resistance. Curator: Exactly. Thinking about art in this context opens new ways of seeing and understanding its social and historical impact.