Norman Cornish, who has died aged 94, was the most famous of the numerous group of pit painters. Sid Chaplin, the novelist from the Durham railway town of Stanley and Cornish's contemporary, once described him in this paper as a "mystic with a total grasp of what makes matter vibrate, from coal to colliery rows, from the workings 1,500ft below ground to the bus stop and the chapel at the end of the street. In himself as well as in his work a prime example of being with it and staying with it".
Cornish had no choice other than to stay with it. Before he was a painter he was a miner, a preordained job for anybody born as he was in Spennymoor, a dozen miles north of Stanley and one of the small colliery towns among a congeries of others such as Ferryhill, Crook and Willington in the coal-heavy triangle between the A1 and the A67 routes in Co Durham northwards to Scotland.
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