Norman Cornish’s work brings to mind the work of Irish artist William Conor, whose drawings and paintings of the working class of Belfast depict that city’s history at the beginning of the 20th century. In common, are the faces, of real people, going about their business in desperate poverty, a kind of photo journalism in oil, watercolour and pencil.
Cornish focused on capturing life in the northern towns but in 1966, a month after he left his job as a miner to become a professional artist, he was invited by Tyne Tees Television to make a documentary about his impressions of Paris. During the week that he was there, the film crew recorded Cornish as he made numerous drawings and sketches of the people and places that he visited while talking to camera about his impressions of life and art in Paris. The results are collected in a small but compelling collection of watercolours and drawings currently showing at the University Gallery in Northumbria. The work shows Cornish’s talent at his best depicting individual characters, busy street scenes, café bars and restaurants.
Of the city, he wrote: ‘Paris is a great encrustation of decoration which reminds me a little of sugar icing. It is an immensely gay city. Like all cities it is impossible to describe in its entirety, one can but give quick impressions. ‘The statues (unlike most in London) are not standing with stiff upper lip to attention but seem to be relaxed or adopting poetic or interesting attitudes… At (the restaurant) Le Grenier, it is impossible to describe. Try to imagine Lautrec, Degas, Monet, Utrillo and then try to imagine all of their paintings come to life and you find yourself lost in the middle
of this humanity with its special flavour.’
Born in Spennymoor, County Durham in 1918, Cornish is widely regarded as one of the most important artists to have emerged from the region in the post-war years. He won his first drawing prize at the age of four and began his working life as a miner when he was 14. He has recalled the moment when he clocked in for his first shift: greeted by the man in charge who said: ‘You have just signed your death warrant son’ and describes the first sight of life below ground thus: ‘The first thing I saw was the gantry scene. The men were there with their orange oil lamps and they looked like fire flies. Then I saw all of these steel railings, steps, girders and steel wires. I thought it looked like a great steel spider’s web and when I saw the colliery behind. I thought it was like a big spider – moving towards us and then going to drop us down a great hole.’
Soon afterwards, having enrolled at the Spennymoor Sketching Club he embarked on the subject that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his professional career, his ‘narrow world’ as the novelist
Sid Chaplin described it. The club was part of the Spennymoor Settlement, a visionary social recreational project, the brainchild of one Bill Farrell, which provided education, art and drama classes to locals, particularly the unemployed.
Here, Cornish developed the latent talent required to bring to life this ‘narrow world’, that included images of the Dean and Chapter Colliery, in which the shapes of the miners echoed the ‘musculature’ of the pit, while above ground he recorded ‘pigeon crees and allotments, pit rows and pubs, fish and chip vans and market stalls’ and ‘offshift miners squatting on their hunkers and soaking in the sunshine and the good crack.’
Like Chaplin, Cornish flourished in the stimulating environment of the Spennymoor Settlement that enabled a rich broadening of his artistic horizons. Amongst his subsequent enthusiasms and influences was the work of Van Gogh and not surprisingly, his work too, has an underlying reverential spirit. Amongst his images, telegraph poles resemble crucifixes and pit gantries Calvary, while his studies of his wife Sarah knitting, gave her, as he put it, ‘a sense of sanctity.’ By the age of forty seven, after thirty three years working in the pit, he took the great risk of living by
his painting. It proved a great move, and one that has left the man, born into working class home he himself described as primitive, much honoured. Cornish has been the subject of several television films, had countless exhibitions nationally, received and carried out numerous commissions, received Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Newcastle, Sunderland and Northumbria, and at ninety-three is the sole distinguished survivor of the Spennymoor Settlement.
The free exhibition Cornish in Paris which runs until February 8th at Northumbria University’s Gallery and Baring Wing comprises twenty works on paper, drawn from the Cornish Archive and shown in the Cornish Drawing Room at the University Gallery. It is a great introduction to the artist’s work.