Call of the wild

The exhibition by two celebrated "primitive" or unschooled artists, Two Painters: Works by Alfred Wallis and James Dixon, that opens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art next Wednesday, owes its existence to two chance meetings which have achieved an almost mythological status in the annals of recent art history. While differing in incidental detail, there is a curious correspondence between them.

In the case of Wallis, the meeting occurred in 1928 and involved two professional painters, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. It was well documented by Nicholson, one of the most famour British artists of the 20th century. With Wood, he was visiting St Ives in Cornwall for the first time. "Walking back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall." Intrigued, they knocked on the door and met Wallis.

At that stage he was in his seventies. He said he had begun painting after the death of his wife - "for company". Born in 1855, he first went to sea when he was only nine, later working as a fisherman from St Ives. But eventually he made his living as a marine rag-and-bone merchant, dealing in bits and pieces from trawlers.

Wallis was based behind the wharf at St Ives, where he had a reputation as a slightly odd, "cantankerous little man." The enthusiasm of Nicholson, Wood and other artists for his work was deep and genuine. They encouraged him, bought paintings and publicised them. He appreciated their support but had little interest in any notion of a belated artistic career and, indeed, never made all that much money from the many pictures he sold.

His paintings, small and often irregularly shaped, are dominated by sea, boats and the harbour shoreline. Though he worked with whatever paint he could get - often cadged from fishermen painting their boats - he has a remarkably disciplined palette, perfectly attuned to the subdued, moody greys, greens and blues of the coast. He rarely attempts perspective, and his combination of map-like and bird's-eye views flatten out the picture plane, something more acceptable to a modernist like Nicholson than it was to the academic painters in Cornwall at the time, who by all accounts didn't care for his work at all.

The second meeting took place on Tory Island about 30 years later. It was between James Dixon and the English painter Derek Hill, who had a house in Church Hill on the mainland. Since 1956, he had visited Tory in the summer to paint, staying in a tiny, isolated hut built to monitor shipping during the First World War. The romantic account has it that Dixon looked over his shoulder one day as he was painting a landscape, said "I could do better," or words to that effect, and was thereafter inspired to set to work with paint and donkey-tail brushes, thus initiating the celebrated Tory Island School of unschooled painters.

The less romantic version has it that Dixon had already been painting for many years, and that his boast was a piece of bravado directed at a fellow artist. This is supported by an account by Wallace Clark, who visited Tory regularly in the early 1950s, of receiving several paintings from Dixon, including one of Clark himself in his yacht. But it must be said that the various anecdotes don't provide any one, consistent, unambiguous account.

What is certain is that from the moment of that chance meeting, Hill played a pivotal role in encouraging and publicising the Tory Island artists and Dixon became quite a prolific painter. It seems very likely that Hill was correct when he wrote, in 1967, that before their encounter Dixon had indeed painted, but only occasionally, when he noticed something that caught his imagination.

Dixon was born on Tory in 1887 and lived all his life on the island apart from a brief sojourn in the west of Ireland. He worked as a fisherman and farmer and, not surprisingly, the sea dominates his paintings. As Hill has pointed out, his view of the island and the sea is far removed from that of the urban-dwelling mainlander. For the islanders, Tory is a harsh, unforgiving environment, and there is a severe, utilitarian air to Dixon's carefully observed, narrative accounts of island life and incidents at sea.

Again, as with Wallis, his surroundings inform his palette. The greys, greens and earth colours that he mixes are subdued and atmospherically accurate. As he said once, "You don't get all that much colour here, except the blues and greys of the sky and the glistening of the sea." His style is freer than that of Wallis, largely because that he eschews the hard, defining outline that the latter was so fond of, so that his paintings have a softer, more atmospheric touch - and can sometimes appear overly rushed.

Of course, to say something like this raises the question of the terms in which you can criticise such paintings, or whether you should criticise them at all, since they are not produced by professional artists. At the beginning of the century, part of the appeal of the "primitive" for artists such as Picasso was that it represented an authenticity from which they were removed, and that they could in some sense appropriate for their own work. Witness Picasso's conscious employment of tribal art idioms in his Cubist painting and sculpture. And Wallis certainly influenced the work of some St Ives painters.

There is also the possibility of an artist such as Wallis becoming a kind of mascot for the more stylistically sophisticated artists around him. In fact, all the evidence is that he was held in high esteem not just by Nicholson but by very many artists who came into contact with his work.

There is the cautionary example of Le Douanier Rousseau, who never thought of himself as a "primitive" artist at all, but was so regarded by the world at large. He was adopted as a mascot by a group of avant garde cultural figures, including Picasso. In his biography of Picasso, John Richardson provides a cruel, revealing account of the celebrated banquet held in honour of Rousseau in 1908 which suggests that Picasso, while on one level kind to him, really regarded him as an enormous joke. The warmth and openness of both Nicholson and Hill seems a million miles removed.

Inevitably, there is a substantial market for "primitive" and naive art, and the growth of this market has meant that the naif has often become faux naif, a stylistic commodity in itself. Against this background it is logical that part of the rationale of the exhibition at IMMA is that it raises issues of cultural inclusion and exclusion, and artistic priorities. But, still, in the end its real strength is likely to be the fact that both Wallis and Dixon were painters whose work stands up to scrutiny and deserves to be seen by as wide a public as possible.

Two Painters: Works by Alfred Wallis and James Dixon opens at IMMA next Wednesday and continues until November 21st