CASTLEGATE HOUSE GALLERY | SUMMER SELECTION SHOW
Norman Cornish, A Back Lane, ink and watercolour on paper, with permission of the artist’s estate.
Castlegate House Gallery, in the charming market town of Cockermouth in the Lake District, is holding its ‘Summer Selection’ show until August 31, featuring works by the likes of Joan Eardley, Miles Richmond, John Bellany and Norman Cornish, pictured above.
Cornish, who died in 2014, was the last of the ‘Pitmen painters’, who spent a lifetime painting and drawing his working-class surroundings in and around Spennymoor, County Durham: all whippets and flat caps and pints down the pub, and back-to-back terraced housing, and colleagues trudging through the early-morning darkness to the coal-mine.
He was a miner himself, who started work at 14, and was invalided out after 33 years, aged 47, after which he dedicated himself full-time to painting. And successfully so: he enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions in Newcastle and London, and was awarded an MBE in 2008 for his contribution to art. Edward Heath was a collector of his work.
He is often associated with LS Lowry, and the two painters became friends, but they painted in very different styles. Cornish was clearly proud of his surroundings, but he did little to romanticise them, and his legacy is documentary, as well as aesthetic.
Castlegate House Gallery director Steve Swallow says, of Cornish: “Norman is increasingly being seen as a chronicler of a working-class 20th century society that has all but disappeared. His works are as relevant in Billericay and Solihull as they are in his home county of County Durham. They are an observation of a community he was an integral part of, at both work and leisure; truly an authentic social history record.”
Castlegate House Gallery will be showing work by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Cathy Lewis, Craig Simpson, Sheila Fell and Grayson Perry at Stand 49 at British Art Fair.