Coasting

ALFRED WALLIS’S popular maritime paintings have been reproduced many thousands of times, on greetings cards, mugs and mouse mats. His vigorously simplified ships and high, plashy seas combine the serendipity of kindergarten painting with Folk Art's nostalgia-factor. A mariner, who went to sea at the age of nine, serving in the merchant navy and on deep-sea fishing boats before trading as a marine scrap dealer, Wallis was a childless widower in his seventies when he was first ‘discovered’ by