NORMAN CORNISH’S family didn’t need to see him sketching to know what he was up to. The aroma of his trademark Flo-master pen would fill the air, and the noise of its nib rushing across the paper would be the soundtrack to their lives.
“John, his son, talks of the smell and squeak of the pen – even if he didn’t know his father was sketching, he could smell the ink and hear the noise,” says Vicky Sturrs who has co-curated the exhibition which opened last week at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. It features images from the Spennymoor artist’s 269 known sketchbooks.
“He used to carry a book at all times in a poacher’s pocket that his wife, Sarah, sewed into his jacket,” says Vicky. “He was prolific and the books are so interesting in telling us about his world and the world he was seeing.
“He sketched rapidly. There’s one book of whippet after whippet after whippet as he was trying to work things through – it was all about him getting the right pose, the right shape for when it went into the final composition.
“There’re sketches over sketches over sketches, and there’re notes to himself – it is like he emptied his brain out on to the pages.”
The new exhibition, A Life in Sketchbooks, is a follow-up to the Bowes’ two blockbuster Cornish exhibitions in the last decade that have been among its most popular ever.
MORE ABOUT NORMAN CORNISH BY CHRIS LLOYD:
THE STORY OF COUNTY DURHAM'S GREATEST ARTIST
OR: IN NORMAN CORNISH'S STUDIO
AND: FROM 2008, AN INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN CORNISH WHEN HE WAS AWARDED AN MBE
Norman needs no introduction. He was born in 1919, started his first shift as a miner on Boxing Day at the age of 14 down the Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill, and worked 30 years underground. He was encouraged to “paint what you know” and so dedicated himself to portraying life in the pit community in which he lived until 2014.
“Sometimes he’s called a ‘pitman painter’, but in terms of British realism, of turning the human figure, of working with empathy and feeling, and of recording with a personal eye, an insider’s eye, he is really up there with those artists who have a wider international profile,” says Vicky, the museum’s director of programmes and collections.
“He is not a minor artist or a miner artist – he painted and drew so many things with a wider nature.”
As well as the sketchbooks, the exhibition features several of Cornish’s big hits – there is, of course, a bar scene – as well as the Bowes’ new acquisition of a beautiful picture of Norman’s wife at work in the kitchen.
“We exhibited it in the 2024 exhibition and it was a crowd pleaser, people absolutely loved it,” says Vicky. “It is very different for Cornish because it is not a mining scene or a wet Friday night at the fish and chip van. It is really intimate, Sarah is peeling potatoes, she’s crouched over them as if in prayer. It is often called the ‘Pitman’s Madonna’ and there’s such a reverence to it, a lightness of touch.
“It is considering the role women played in the coalfield as homemakers, all their unseen labour that kept it all going. It feels like a tribute to her and all the women like her.
“We have so many portraits that John and Josephine Bowes collected of political figures or rich people or actors and they can be difficult to relate to, but this is very immediate.
“After the exhibition, Sarah will be hung in our gallery where she will be able to have a dialogue with some of those people.”
The purchase, with money from the museum’s Friends legacy, means that the coaly lad from the ’Moor will hang alongside internationally renowned works that the museum’s founders collected on the continent between 1862 and 1874.
“Story telling is so important, how people can see themselves in the artworks, how there’s relevance to our lives,” says Vicky. “Whether it’s a Canaletto from centuries ago or a Cornish from decades ago, we can lose ourselves in them, there are a lot of similarities.
“Norman Cornish stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the greats in our collection, he just doesn’t have the same fame, and that’s why our collecting him contributes to his legacy and the awareness of him and how great he was.”
The museum is using the exhibition to raise funds to purchase a second classic Cornish so that for generations to come a slice of life in interwar Salvin Street in Spennymoor will hang alongside early 18th Century views of Venetian canal pageants.
And Norman’s sketches, often made in the squeaky felt tip Flo-Master that in his fingers somehow became a fine instrument, reveal to the world how great an artist he was.
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“In terms of composition, he is incredibly successful and the sketchbooks show it was incredibly intentional – it was not by accident, but he was refining, refining, refining his compositions until it got to the point where he was happy,” says Vicky.
“But the sketches aren’t preparatory work, they are in themselves artworks, a raw and real connection to Norman, and it is lovely to be able to take people closer to this person we have exhibited so often and who means so much to them.”
- Norman Cornish: A Life in Sketchbooks runs until January 3
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