Norman Cornish

Norman Stansfield Cornish (18 November 1919 – 1 August 2014) was an English miner and an artist, particularly in the field of painting, focusing on mining life and community.

Biography Norman Cornish was born in 1919 in Spennymoor, (later to house the Spennymoor Settlement) in County Durham in North East England. and continued to work as a miner after his painting career was established, until he retired to become a full-time artist in 1966. Cornish died in 2014. A former miner, he was known for his pictures of mining community life. Other artistic contemporaries of Cornish from the Spennymoor Settlement included Herbert Dees, Robert Heslop and Tom McGuinness.

Cornish was granted an honorary Master of Arts degree by Newcastle University in 1974, He was a contemporary and friend of the artist L. S. Lowry.

The largest collection of Cornish's work is held by Northumbria University, with the oldest painting, Colliery Row, dating to 1947. A mural showing the Durham Miners Gala is in Bishop Auckland Town Hall. It was originally displayed in County Hall, Durham, but the building is scheduled for demolition.

Legacy To mark the 100th anniversary of Cornish's birth, the Bowes Museum organised the first "major retrospective" of Cornish's work. The exhibition was scheduled to run from November 2019 to February 2020. An exhibition of some of Cornish's 269 sketchbooks was scheduled for display over the same period at Durham University's Palace Green Library.

In 2019, a 'Norman Cornish Trail' was created in Spennymoor to allow people to follow a 1.5 mile route to view many of the scenes painted by Cornish.

A room within the art gallery at Spennymoor Town Hall has been dedicated to exhibiting paintings by Cornish.