What began in the early 1930s as an evening class for Northumberland miners keen to learn about art was a process which had the men producing their own work within weeks. Over the next few years, they produced a complete record of a mining community's life: clocking-on; the coal face; the pithead baths; Saturday night at the club; the dog track; pigeon crees; the corner shop and the allotment.
Their materials might be the cardboard of Gold Flake packing cases and Walpamur paint, but their realistic subject matter, painted from inside knowledge and experience, rather than as outside observers, is powerfully convincing. Although this accorded with the strong interest in the idea of working men's art prevalent in the '30s, the achievement of Harry Wilson, Jimmy Floyd, Len Robinson, Fred Laidler, Oliver Kilbourn and the others is best seen as a collective self-discovery. As Professor Robert Colls put it in Geordies: 'They refused to become exemplary northerners. By stubbornly holding on to their independence, refusing to accept an evaluation from outside, the Ashington painters were bidding for wholeness' despite the pressure from 'a complex and beguiling system of cultural patronage.'
Their first exhibition was at the Hatton gallery in Newcastle in 1936, followed by one at the Laing Gallery in 1938 and another in 1941. Their tutor for eight years, Robert Lyon, left Newcastle in 1942, the year of their first London exhibition. William Feaver recalls meeting the Ashington painters in 1971, when he was teaching at the Royal Grammar School and working as art critic for the Newcastle Journal. He has written an absorbing book entitled The Pitmen Painters (1988), setting the work of the group in the context of their times and the Ashington community they depicted. The Ashington pitman painters were the first western artists to be exhibited in China after Mao's cultural revolution.
The work of the Spennymoor Settlement in encouraging the artistic talents of local miners is splendidly illustrated in Gillian Wales' Shafts of Light (2000). The book discusses, among other topics, the reason why the coal industry was unique in spawning artists keen to depict their working lives. The paintings of Norman Cornish, Tom McGuiness, Bob Heslop. Bob Sawyer and many others deserve to be more widely recognised outside the region. Tony Blair has said that his favourite artist is Norman Cornish, but there are no pictures by him on the walls of No. 10.