Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

We are currently in the process of developing one of the Group's brands and as seasiders we had the inevitable conversation about how we might differ to London agencies? What does this mean for our clients? How could we show them the benefits of working with an agency outside London? Trips on a tractor, the smell of manure, you know, the sort of thing you would expect from an agency outside London. Any how, during this conversation someone bought up the name of the dead Cornish painter Alfred Wallis. Wallis, an ex fisherman, turned to painting at the age of 70 after his wife died.

Painting seascapes and St Ives, the area where he lived, Wallis developed a distinctive style that had a real sense of unrestrained creativity - almost endearingly child like. Wallis for example had no preconceptions of how the sea should look, he painted it just how he saw it in his head. Self taught Wallis would use anything he could get his hands on. The scarcity of paint and canvas meant Wallis would use old tins of boat paint and scraps of cardboard to create his work. Wallis' sense of perspective and proportion wasn't conventional and based solely on his own reality and memories of decades at sea.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story of this is yet, but it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps that's enough. No worse or better than anything else. Just a different perspective and a different attitude.