SHAFTS OF LIGHT, the largest exhibition of North-East mining art to be shown for decades, opens today at the Bowes Museum.

On the following pages, the curators of the exhibition, Robert Mc- Manners and Gillian Wales, reveal some of their favourite images. The exhibition is drawn largely from their Gemini Collection, which contains more than 200 works and is believed to be the largest private collection of mining artwork in the country.

Other exhibits for Shafts of Light have been loaned from national and regional institutions and from private individuals making this the largest exhibition of mining art in this country since 1980.

Some of the works are by professional artists who found themselves mesmerised by the mines and the mining communities, but many are by the miners themselves, telling their own stories in art. They were often self-taught and they never meant their works to be exhibited or sold.

Yet, from among their number emerged some of the most important artists in Britain in the latter half of the 20th Century. Artists of the stature of Tom McGuinness, Ted Holloway and Norman Cornish will all stand the test of time.

The exhibition asks the bewildering question: why did coalminers paint the coal mines? Why, after spending eight hours in a dark, cacophonous, claustrophobic hole in the ground did they come home and start work painting that very same dark, cacophonous, claustrophobic hole?

The result of their labours – at the easel, if not the coalface – is a body of work which is found in no other industry. As well as as key questions about their tough livelihoods, their drawings and paintings record what it was like, both physically and spiritually, to be among the hundreds of thousands who worked underground in County Durham.

The exhibition opens today at the Barnard Castle museum and runs until September 21.

ROBERT MCMANNERS and Gillian Wales’ book, Shafts of Light, has been republished to coincide with the exhibition.

It costs £14.95 softback, or there is a limited edition of signed hardback copies for £24.95. It is available, with a new cover, at the exhibition or by sending a cheque (including £2.50 post and packing) to West House, 5 Etherley Lane, Bishop Auckland, DL14 7QR. E-mail robertmcmanners@hotmail.com or call 01388-602180 for further information.

TODAY’S Memories cover shows Off the Way, by Bob Olley – “the Geordie Lowry”.

He was born in South Shields in 1940, and left school aged 15 to go down Whitburn and Westoe pits.

The Northern Echo:
The Shafts of Light poster

He painted while he worked, but in the late 1960s found success when prints of his painting Westoe Netty started selling around the world.

It shows miners at a graffiti-covered outside urinal with a distracted boy accidentally widdling on someone’s boots. Today’s cover shows Bob’s dramatic use of light to portray the heroic power and energy of the three miners as they haul a coal tub back onto the tracks.