Artist Norman Cornish was made an MBE in the New Year's Honours List. As an exhibition of his work opens in the North-East, Chris Lloyd meets the former miner who has chronicled the lives of pitmen in the region, a way of life now lost to us

THE brushes are neatly planted in their unglazed jugs by the window, the white-haired tufts of their bristles poking up like little flowerheads. The tubes of paint are lined up along the table, squeezed like toothpaste and smudged with fingerprints that betray the colours inside. Their caps all face tidily into the light.

Higgledy-piggledy piles of canvases lean against the walls and a hotch-potch of pages from old notebooks lies scattered across the surfaces - just visible are hints of half-finished paintings, hurried pen and ink sketches and unpursued ideas.

The mantlepiece is covered in a jumble of paraphernalia, of splattered rulers, of chewed slugs of charcoal, of scrumpled rags. Old posters advertising exhibitions are pinned onto the walls but, in the corner beside the window, is a new addition: a billposter, borrowed from a board outside a newsagent's, advertising The Northern Echo.

"Artist Norman Cornish's MBE joy,"

it says in big, bold capital letters.

Only someone has tried to remove the word joy'.

"Joy's not me," says the vandal himself, Norman Cornish. "Joy is what the teenage girl who wins Pop Idol does." He stiffly pulls his 88-year-old lean frame off his stool and disdainfully mimics the over-wrought shrieking of a TV gameshow contestant.

So, joy is not the right word to describe his reaction to his appearance in the New Year's Honours list. He ponders what is - words are very important to Norman, as the crossword book and the pile of dictionaries beside his favourite chair testify - and finally agrees on pleased.

He is pleased - but not proud.

"I'll save that energy for my next painting," he says.

And he'd much rather talk about that next painting. Two versions of it dominate his studio in the upstairs of his house in Spennymoor, the town where he was born in 1919. One is the rough version on a piece of hardboard propped up on an old table; the other is the real thing, about five feet by three feet, artfully held in place by two easels so that it catches all the light falling through the window on a grey day.

The painting is called Colliery Memory.

"When I was courting my wife Sarah - that would be 60 years ago - the bus from Spennymoor used to come round the corner into Trimdon Grange and this is the scene I used to see as I got off," he says.

The memory is dominated by two pitheads with spinning winding gear. Men labour up a steep set of steps and as they cross the railway bridge, they are lost from sight by a belch of steam and smoke from the engine on the tracks below.

Around the margins, women stop for a gossip. Children climb on the crossing gate or bowl a hoop along the terrace. A dog barks. Pigeons flit through the sky.

White washing billows on a line beneath a smoking chimney.

"I'm painting it because you don't get this today, this mixed up jumble of streets and washing and collieries and railways all in a great big heap together,"

he says.

"When I'm painting I forget about out here and I'm in there. There's no one to talk to unless there's someone in there to talk to. If it's snowing in there, I feel cold. I'm with the men when they finish work. I try to be part of what's happening."

He's been drawing since he can remember.

"I was a menace with it, a nuisance,"

he says. "Drawing was an itch I had to scratch."

Norman's formal schooling ended at 14. It was the early 1930s, a time of economic depression. He was the eldest of seven. His father, a miner, was temporarily out of work so he became a datal lad - paid by the day - at the Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill to ease the family's finances.

"The overman in his deep voice said you've just signed your death warrant, son'," says Norman. "Above the door as you went out of the lamp cabin onto the gantry was a big poster with a drawing of a cat, and it said: The cat has nine lives. You have one. Take care of it'.

"That first day, I went through the door and it was twilight. The gantry looked like a big steel spider's web, the pithead rearing above it was the spider, and the men with their orange oil lamps going over the gantry were like fireflies caught in the web and it was going to drop them down the big dark hole."

You can paint your own picture For 30 years he worked down that pit until, in the early 1960s, with collieries closing all around, he was transferred to a drift mine at Tudhoe. "It was an absolute wet hell. I worked six shifts and every day was worse. On the sixth day, I could hardly get out of bed and Sarah said, put your notice in - if you don't, I will'." He did.

He became a professional artist. He'd been scratching the itch at the Spennymoor Settlement, a community art group, and had been gradually building up a following.

But professionalism changed his attitude to his art. "There were times when you just wanted to relax and have a pint, but you couldn't because you'd see interesting things - that lady hanging out her washing on a clothes line will not ever, ever happen again exactly like that," he explains.

He took the advice of his Settlement tutor and painted what he knew. His family, people in the street, miners, men in pubs "I used to go to the pub to do drawing and not much drinking," he says, Sarah listening quietly and supportively in her chair. "I thought it was a wonderful studio to meet all these people being themselves, not pretending to be John Wayne.

"I found them fascinating and the more I drew them, the more involved I became and I started thinking about shapes as well as people."

The shapes he has painted record a slice of life that is fading even from living memory. Chip vans, cloth caps and bait boxes are as long gone as the collieries and steam engines; men smoking tabs in pubs is a new departure.

"It was only when people started saying that I was recording history that I became aware of it," he says. "It's just as well I wasn't aware because I would have been a more historically accurate rather than real."

And it's that realness that has won him an MBE. Norman Cornish is more than a historical artist. He is more than a pitman painter. His paintings are so real that you can hear the bark of the dog and feel the whoosh of the steam.

"I don't mind being called a mining artist, but I have been a professional artist almost twice as long as I was a miner," he says. "I paint human beings, the kids playing with skippy ropes, the boys with snowballs - all people. I paint their hopes and their shapes and their attitudes and the feelings I have when I look at them.

"In fact, the images all come from the people. They create them and I paint them. I am just the medium."

A very modest MBE - just not a joyful one.