The Narrow World of Norman Cornish

About

Cornish was 14 when he bagan his life as a miner at the Dean and Chapter Colliery, Spennymoor. He worked as a pitman for the next 33 years and then at the age of 47 committed himself to living by his painting which he had begun in the late 1930s. Today, at the age of 92, he is still active and responding to that 'narrow world' with undiminished energy. The novelist Sid Chaplin who originally coined the phrase meant it ironically, of course. It can be taken to mean the dangerously claustrophobic world of the pit, the comfortable world of a Durham mining village or as a microcosm of the world at large. Longbefore the Angel of the North, Cornish's work, with its boundless humanity, was loved and admired as a symbol of the north-east's resilience. With the demise of the coal industry and the decline of the culture dependent on it, a few pits have been converted into mining hertiage centres. They do thier job of documentation competently enough but they cannot compare with the heightened, felt experience that Cornish offers. Above all, he presents us with what the American photographer Robert Frank called the humanity of the moment"."