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Published: 11 March 2010
BY DAN CARRIER

NORMAN Cornish spent the days deep below ground, hacking away at a coal face with a pickaxe. 

He had left school when he was 14 and headed down the pit in the colliery town of Spennymoor. 

But while the dark tunnels kept him busy during the day, Cornish emerged blinking into the light to become a renowned chronicler of coal mining communities. 

For most of the 20th century and into the 21st he has carefully painted the working lives – and social pastimes – of his contemporaries, turning to his easel after scrubbing the coal dust from his face in a tin bath in front of a small, open range. Now a major exhibition of his work is gracing the walls of Kings Place Gallery in King’s Cross.

It was through the auspices of an arts club in his home town of Spennymoor in the industrial heartlands of the North-East where he got his first grounding in art and encouragement to express himself, just months after heading to the pits for the first time.

Curator and family friend of the miner Mara-Helen Wood said Norman’s natural skills were helped by a unique pithead arts college that provided education to the culture-thirsty miners of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

“Even as a child he drew and painted,” explains Mara-Helen. “He won prizes at school for his work. He clearly could have gone on to further education.” Instead he joined the Spennymoor Settlement, an arts community that included a library and arts classes. 

He honed his skill during the 1930s and his first solo exhibition came after the war in 1947. It was in Newcastle and he sold five paintings to the director of education at the newly formed National Coal Board: they were given pride of place at the Board’s new London headquarters and his work began to find new audiences. Other major commissions included a mural for the Durham County Hall – he was offered £1,000 to complete it, a fortune for a miner used to bringing home meagre wages often based on his personal productivity.

And although the painter come from the solid-Labour world of northern mining communities, he found an unlikely champion in Tory prime minister Edward Heath, who bought two of his works and hung them in Downing Street.

Remarkably, despite his continuing success, Cornish worked in the pits until the late-1960s, when he had to quit because of a bad back.

But it is the people of County Durham that hold Cornish’s work closest to them: and the reason, says Mara-Helen, is these scenes of life in Spennymoor are instantly recognisable. “When these pictures are shown in the North, a lot of people say they recognise their grandparents and the streets in which they were born,” she says. 

Norman’s collection includes 360 sketches as well as his body of paintings: early works include portraits of his family, and are often on untreated cardboard or paper. 

“He has captured the industrial heritage in front of him,” added Mara-Helen.

• Norman Cornish: A Shot Against Time, The Pit Road and Other Paintings is at Kings Place Gallery, York Way, NW1, until April 23. 020 7520 1485. www.kingsplace.co.uk