Seven
Norman Cornish paintings realise about £47,000 when they fall under hammer
22nd June
2013
Tyne And
Wear
By Gavin
Engelbrecht
SEVEN
works by celebrated County Durham mining artist Norman Cornish realised about
£47,000 when they fell under the hammer this week.
Among the
pieces up for sale at the Anderson and Garland auction house in Newcastle were
several examples of the Spennymoor artist's much-sought-after early work,
including the pastel painting Colliery At Night: Pit Road, which was sold for
£12,200.
A Man And
His Dog, expected to reach £9,000, went for £12,000, while pen and watercolour
of A Spennymoor Back Street, realised £8,600.
Three of
the paintings came from The Stone Gallery in Newcastle, where Cornish was first
discovered.
The
auction house’s print and pictures expert, John Bullock-Anderson said: “The
sale went really well. “It was good to get more than £10,000 for a couple of
the paintings.
“They
were good examples from the early1970s. I don’t think there is any doubt that
Norman Cornish is the only claimant to the crown – greatest living North-East
artist.”
Only one
of the works did not sell.
This
article is more than 10 years old
Obituary
Norman
Cornish obituary
Pit
painter with an acute eye and warmth of feeling for the realities of colliery
life
Michael
McNay
Mon 4 Aug
2014 18.11 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/04/norman-cornish
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. One is running
now at Kings Place until 22 August.
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
This article was amended on 5 August 2014. An
earlier version said Sid Chaplin came from Stanley; that has been corrected to
Shildon. It also said Sheila Fell trained at the Chelsea School of Art; that
has been corrected to St Martin's.
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