Norman Cornish, who has died aged 94, was the most famous of the numerous group of pit painters. Sid Chaplin, the novelist from the Durham railway town of Shildon and Cornish's contemporary, once described him in this paper as a "mystic with a total grasp of what makes matter vibrate, from coal to colliery rows, from the workings 1,500ft below ground to the bus stop and the chapel at the end of the street. In himself as well as in his work a prime example of being with it and staying with it". Cornish had no choice other than to stay with it. Before he was a painter he was a miner, a preordained job for anybody born as he was in Spennymoor, a dozen miles north of Shildon and one of the small colliery towns among a congeries of others such as Ferryhill, Crook and Willington in the coal-heavy triangle between the A1 and the A67 routes in Co Durham northwards to Scotland.
Fewer than 100 years before Cornish's birth the nascent south Durham coal industry determined the foundation of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, financed by Joseph Pease, the Quaker businessman, so that instead of coals to Newcastle he would have a more efficient means of transport than canals from the group of pits that included Spennymoor to the new Teesmouth terminal of Middlesbrough. Pease made his fortune and shaped the destiny of generations of youngsters.
So, every morning at dawn from the age of 14, Cornish, like his father, hurtled downwards crammed into a pit cage to his job at the Dean and Chapter colliery (the butcher's shop, as it was known), hewing at the coal face, emerging to paint in his spare time with the Spenny moor Settlement, a cut-down cultural variant of the American New Deal. "I was to learn that the dangers of gas, stone falls, the darkness and the restricted space, were all to shape these men into industrial gladiators," he wrote in his autobiography, A Slice of Life (1989).
As with LS Lowry from the Manchester industrial conurbation, and Sheila Fell from the Cumbrian pit village of Aspatria, Cornish was formed by his environment. There was one crucial difference: the debt-collector Lowry, for all his appearance of naivety, and Fell, daughter of a miner, were art-school products. Indeed the St Martin's-trained Fell, in what seemed to her to be her media breakthrough, being featured in 1963 on Huw Wheldon's BBC arts programme, Monitor (directed by the young Melvyn Bragg), was indignant to find that she was yoked together with the little known part-timer Cornish, as examples of that oddity, a northerner; in his case one of the 90% of Spennymoor's 25,000 inhabitants who grew up in a tied house without a lavatory or bathroom.
If that is how she felt, there is little wonder that in the schismatic world of London galleries, where the battles were fought over a Paris-New York axis, writers found themselves having to cope with painters digging deep into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They just didn't fit; even now, Lowry, after his posthumous retrospective at Tate Britain last year, is filed under "much loved".
Much-loved Cornish was 33 years down the mines before the attrition of swinging a pick in a confined space made the pain in his back unendurable. It was 1966 and he had doubts about making a living from painting, but his wife, Sarah, told him she would cope with what little they had and that anyway he would make it.
He already had foundations. In 1946 he had had a first solo exhibition at the People's Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in late 1959 he held his first show at the enterprising Mick and Tilly Marshall's Stone Gallery, also in Newcastle but with nationwide connections. In 1962 he executed a 30ft mural for the new county hall in Durham. In 1974 Newcastle University awarded him an honorary MA. His shows were confined mostly to Co Durham and Northumberland until the last few years, when a series at Kings Place Gallery, King's Cross, with its direct connection to Newcastle and its link with the University Gallery at Northumbria University, put on a sequence of shows.
His virtues remain the dexterity of hand and acute eye of a fine illustrator and a warmth of feeling (and colour) for the community of which he was part, men shuffling to the pithead through a grey dawn, or under the colliery's hellish and sulphurous outdoor lighting, or again, heads together at a pub bar, chuckling. He was great with the colour of a pint of bitter.
A comparison with Josef Herman, a non-miner whose powerful paintings of Welsh miners fix the essence of man at work, throw into relief the different achievements. Cornish paints working men, not a totem of working man. He becomes a poor copyist when he tries to harness the qualities of Van Gogh or Edvard Münch. Art with a capital A was not his medium, but his lower-case, flat-cap art is now part of history. Like the collieries – and the flat caps.
He is survived by Sarah and their two children, John and Ann.
Norman Cornish, miner and painter, born 18 November 1919; died 1 August 2014
Around the same time he joined a sketching club at the Spennymoor Settlement, the charitable institute bringing education and art to miners and their families. Norman had already won a prize of a halfpenny for drawing an old lady’s boot – he was four – but under expert guidance his talent flowered and he began painting the life around him: the pit, the streets of his town, the faces of its people, and he was still doing the same thing seventy-five years later. He never lived anywhere other than Spennymoor; he rarely painted anywhere else. It gave him all he needed; it was in the best sense ‘the narrow world’ of Norman Cornish.
At Dean and Chapter he met the originator of that phrase, another young man with a dream of becoming an artist, the novelist-to-be, my father Sid Chaplin. They became friends, as did Sarah Cornish and my mother Rene. Thus I grew up with Norman, not just because I saw a lot of him, but because I looked at his pictures my parents had bought or been given. Actually I lived with these paintings, day after day, year after year, passing them countless times, so their shapes imprinted themselves on my subconscious and their meaning seeped into my head and heart. I especially remember a sequence of pictures that marched up the staircase of our house like a procession of miners’ lodge banners at the Durham Gala. Each of these pictures told a story. First was a quintessential Cornish image. A back lane, a windy Monday, rows of washing blowing on lines, children playing. You look at this picture with its economy and movement and instinctively know what’s going to happen next: a football will soon muddy a sheet and a woman in an apron will come running.
hen there was a Big Meeting picture, impressionistic, with tiny splashes of colour, and two images that Norman returned to time and again: a figure underground, wielding a pick in a thin seam, the pitted muscular torso twisted to gain maximum purchase; and a bar scene featuring the broad back of a drinker, stubby fingers curved around a glass and below, his whippet, waiting, eyes imploring. Finally, crowning the ascent, a strange picture that fascinated me: a pithead gantry in the background, stark and foreboding, in front hunched figures climbing iron steps towards it. As a boy this struck me as a vision of Calvary, but I never mentioned it to anyone – it seemed too fanciful a notion. When I first clapped my eyes on the work of Stanley Spencer, an epiphany sang in my head: if Christ could walk the lanes of Cookham, then surely he could ride the cage at Dean and Chapter too, and pit people could find redemption, of a kind.
Spennymoor was essentially a Victorian invention, springing up in the years after Tudhoe Ironworks was opened in 1853. Shafts were sunk round about to feed the furnaces with coal: Whitworth, Page Bank, Tudhoe, Westerton, Newfield, and eventually the pit where Norman Cornish was to spend the bulk of his mining life, the Dean and Chapter. Railway lines were laid, chapels built, the odd school, and long terraces to house miners and their families, drawn from the four corners of Britain by the prospect of work. They included the Cornish family, and it was here in the shadow of the town hall clock that Norman was born shortly after the end of the First World War. He spent his entire life there, and painted its life from his teens into his late 80’s, returning obsessively to the same images decades after they had passed from view.
Not so long ago, I visited Norman and Sarah and after a fine lunch, was given a tour of the artist’s studio, lined with books and LPs, paintings and drawings stacked against the walls, a work-in-progress on the easel, the faint smell of oil paint in the air. After Norman had given a vigorous rendition of the Peasants’ Thanksgiving Dance in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, he spoke of the changing physical and spiritual landscape around him. He told me my dad once said that Spennymoor was the ugliest place he knew. Norman thought this was unfair, but ‘if it was ugly, it had plenty of character’. Now, he thought, it was ugly no more, but had lost much of that character. Now it had roundabouts, supermarkets, pedestrian walkways, and was beginning to look like everywhere else. It was clear that the loss of the ever-changing shapes of the pit-heaps grieved him especially. ‘I sometime wonder whether someone’s trying to obliterate my life’. Pause. ‘But they can’t – cos it’s all up here’. And tapped his forehead vigorously with a long, bony forefinger. ‘All I have to do is shut my eyes, and I can see it all, down to every last detail’.
Norman was an iconoclast, and sometimes a cheerfully disputacious one, in another way. The easiest way to upset him was to suggest he was a ‘Pitman Painter’. He did not wish to belong to any ‘movement’, and despite the near proximity of other gifted painters drawn to record the same world, men like Tom McGuinness and Robert Heslop, he tended to keep himself to himself, artistically speaking. In the 1960s and 70s he was tempted beyond the precincts of his home town, to Newcastle for instance, and at the prompting of Tyne Tees Television, to the lanes of Montmartre, but apart from one striking portrait of a slab-faced Newcastle United fan wearing a black and white scarf, the results were largely uninspiring. Clearly his heart wasn’t in it: he couldn’t wait to get back home.
Norman’s constantly reworked portrait of Spennymoor life in its heyday established his reputation in the 50s and 60s, allowed him to leave the pit in 1966 – to his relief, as for such a tall man, coal-winning was a daily agony – and sustained it as an old man when his work reached new audiences (via exhibitions at the University of Northumbria Gallery and King’s Place, London, curated by Mara-Helen Wood), among them the children of pitmen, who began to understand mining life, not because they’d lived it, but because they absorbed its nuances from his art, and so connected with what made them what they are. His immense body of work constitutes a powerful, often tender record of the Durham coalfield, a lost world reflected in the set of a cap, an arthritic hand clutching dominoes, a dumpy old lady’s broken umbrella in the rain, the loneliness that hangs on the sloping shoulders of the pitmen trudging down Norman’s mythic pit road from Spennymoor to the Butcher’s Shop.
The irony of course is he was still painting this world long after the pits themselves had gone, wiped clean from the landscape. But it would be wrong to think everything of that old pit culture has gone. Not long after Norman’s death last summer, I returned to Spennymoor after some years, looking for something, I’m not sure what. I made a surprising discovery, that maybe the car has diminished the vigorous street life that was such a feature of Norman’s work – and the cold of an early-closing day didn’t help – but it was still there, if you looked for it. An old man in stout shoes and tweed cap struggled with a recalcitrant dog. A lady in a russet brown headscarf humped two full shopping bags and leaned into the wind. A man carrying lengths of dowling under his arm greeted an acquaintance, his voice booming through the steamed-up window of the café where I sat: ‘Are you all right?’ A toddler ran to a man – his grandad? – who swept him up in the air and swung him around. In the gathering twilight, a lad in wraparound sunglasses swaggered past, one hand in pocket, the other carrying three large loaves of sliced white bread. Half an hour later, he came back, heading the other way, possibly uncertain of his destination. And behind me, underneath the prints of old pastoral scenes, two men discussed their ailments. >‘And I was that bad, I didn’t get me puff back for weeks.’ As they left, his friend called ‘Ta-ra, chick’ to the respectable middle-aged lady behind the counter. They donned their caps. And somehow it didn’t seem to matter that they were of the transatlantic baseball variety.
The longer I spent in the town, the more I glimpsed quintessential Cornish images. I took a walk where the railway lines once snaked southwards, the outline of Auckland Castle etched against a distant hill. Rooks hung in the air, a cat skulked in the willow scrub by the path, half a dozen piebald ponies grazed in a field. There were football pitches, with kids playing, fighting, laughing; and immaculate allotments fenced with discarded garage doors. In one, a row of fat cabbages waited to be lifted by an elderly man, who straightened suddenly, putting a hand to the small of his back. As he saw me, a total stranger, he waved and called out, ‘How do!’
And I wished Norman was there with his sketchbook. Of course, that wasn’t to be, but I hope that sometime another gifted iconoclast might come along to paint the Spennymoor of the 21st century. She or he would certainly inherit the richest of traditions…