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Cornish, Norman

Shortly after he became a miner in 1933, Cornish joined the Spennymoor Settlement, and for the next thirty-three years he drew and painted as well as worked underground. In 1966 he became a professional painter and is now justly the best known of the pitmen artists. He approaches his scenes, as his friend the writer Sid Chaplin noted, with a mixture of love and revulsion. All are local to Spennymoor – above ground, “pigeon crees and allotments, pit rows and pubs, fish and chip vans and market stalls...Underground the conflict is more specific, the lights and the men somehow survive not only darkness but imponderables of water, weight, pressure and contracting space” (McManners and Wales 2002:121). Often, as in this sketch, he shows the footpath between Spennymoor and the Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill, where he and Heslop both worked. DA