Published: 16 February, 2012
by JOHN GULLIVER

HOW did Norman Cornish hew away at coal as a miner for more than 30 years, from boyhood to middle-age, and still manage to paint masterpieces that made me gasp as they swept into my view on Tuesday evening?

Hockney and Freud no doubt will draw the crowds at their over-hyped current shows, but drop in at a King’s Cross exhibition and wonder at what made Cornish – surely one of Britain’s great artists – tick.

It must have been back-breaking enough just to go down the pit every day.

But imagine Cornish did all that, and then in the evenings and weekends drew and drew like a demon in his small miner’s cottage as his wife and children looked on.

He used any material possible as a “canvas” – sheets of paper, bits of cardboard.

Whatever matter came to hand, as long as he could paint.

If anyone should be considered as a national treasure it is Cornish.

At 93, believe it or not, he is still painting, and not far from the pit village where he lived, near Durham.

He wasn’t interested in plaudits, he wasn’t interested in the latest art fashion, he could only burn with a passion to paint the life around him – his family, his mates in the pub or on their way to their shift in the early hours, or everyday street scenes – and somehow he made the ordinary quite extraordinary.

It wasn’t until his late 40s that he found himself utterly amazed by the fact that the first painting he had sold, accidentally, to a local gallery was the equivalent of several months’ wages.

After that he left the pit – his back had been injured, in any case – and struck out on his own as a painter.

And art collectors throughout the world have been forever grateful.

Housed in what must one of the largest private galleries in London, Kings Place in King’s Cross, are nearly 100 of Cornish’s paintings and drawings.

More than 50 are on sale, and by Tuesday nearly a score had been bought, with prices ranging from about £4,000 to over £20,000.

You may find bits that remind you of Lowry but that is only because both of them were painting a world long gone – the rain spattered two-up and two-down terraced streets, the crowds around the fish-and-chip van, the round-backed men trudging towards the pit.

They are the ones on sale.

But next to them is a large room full of Cornish’s early paintings of himself, his sister, his parents, children and wife, Sarah, who remains his companion today – no doubt fussing over the great man, and with the same affection she gave him in their early years.

His feelings for her run through his portraits.

Writing about Cornish’s paintings, the novelist Sid Chaplin, who worked with him as a miner, writes: “The living are caught before they go; the pigeon fanciers, the offshift miners squatting on their hunkers and taking in  the sunshine and the crack…”

It is a world long gone and captured, fortunately, by a great artist in works that make many of our artists – especially those of today’s fashionable crowd – seem to be of such little significance.

• Norman Cornish: The Early Years runs until March 24 at Kings Place, York Way, N1, Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 12-6pm, admission free,
020 7520 1485, www.kingsplace.co.uk The gallery will be closed on Thursday February 23 from 1-6pm for events linked to Jewish Book Week