Norman Cornish

Norman Cornish was an English painter from Spennymoor in County Durham who worked as a coal miner for 33 years before becoming a full-time artist in 1966. He learned to paint at the Spennymoor Settlement, an educational centre known as the Pitman’s Academy, and spent his life drawing and painting the streets, pubs, chapels and working people of his town. His sketchbooks are full of quick drawings of men at the bar, women with prams and miners walking to the pit. His work is held by museums across the North East, and the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle is showing his sketchbooks.