Tom McGuinness
There are four letters from Tom McGuiness to Ruth Borchard, sent from Bishop Auckland, County Durham. In the first, dated '29.12.58', he writes: 'Sorry for the delay in writing – I had some difficulty in finding an early self-portrait – the panting enclosed was painted some twelve years ago and it was my first attempt at oil painting [...] I'm afraid the portrait is in very poor condition – if it is of any use you can have it.' This painting was apparently not suitable.
In an undated letter, Tom McGuinness writes: 'I'm sorry I have no self-portrait suitable for your requirements – I seldom paint from life, most of my work is from memory, although I could attempt one now, if you would like one.' At the top of this letter, Ruth has written: '22/1/59: yes please – for 15 gns.'
By the time McGuinness painted this self-portrait, he was around thirty-two years old. At first sight, the thick glossy head of hair and thin, rugged features seem to indicate a youthful man. Closer scrutiny highlights a more mature expression of pained enquiry on somewhat worn, taut features, communicated especially through the eyes and slightly downturned mouth. Here is a man in whom an evidently strong sense of identity and innate orderliness – conveyed partly through the black outlines throughout – co-exists with acute perceptiveness. (This orderliness extended to the state of the artist's studio – visitors were known to comment on its neatness.) The complexion is a subtle and fluid admixture of all the other colours in the picture –the muted emerald green of the background, the plum red sweater, the silvery grey jacket and the glowing white of the shirt collar. All these colours are brought together in a disquieting 'map of the face'.
Born in 1926 in Witton Park, County Durham, McGuinness was brought up in his coal-miner grandfather's household. His talent for drawing was recognised early and encouraged by two art teachers at school. In 1944, he was 'conscripted' to work in the local coal mines as a Bevin Boy. A percipient colliery supervisor, on seeing McGuinness drawing in chalk on the side of a coal tub, advised that he attend art classes, which he then did locally at Darlington School of Art four evenings a week, under the tuition of Ralph Leslie Swinden R.A.
He left the coal industry in 1947 to work on the railways, and the following year rented an attic studio room in a theatrical boarding house, where he began painting in earnest, notably portraits. In 1948 he joined the Sketching Club at the Settlement, Spennymoor (which had been founded in 1931 to give unemployed miners creative activities – in music, drama and the visual arts – during the Great Depression, and which went on to help foster the talents of local miner painters such as, notably, McGuinness and Norman Cornish (1919-2014), and writers including the miner-turned-author Sid Chaplin (1916-1986)). Bill Farrell – the first Warden at the Settlement – encouraged McGuinness and Cornish to draw entirely from life and to use only the best materials. By this time, McGuinness had begun to paint seriously; he started to attend local art exhibitions, and began reading about artists such as Dürer, Goya and Rembrandt, finding himself especially impressed by Turner and Daumier. McGuinness attended the Spennymoor Settlement until 1951; he then returned to study at art classes in Darlington.
What has been described as 'a turning point in Tom's artistic career' was the decision in 1953 not to take up a commercial art career in southern England but to return to work as a coal-miner, painting and drawing in his spare time. In 1949, the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead bought his lucid and compassionate conté drawing of a miner cradling a child in his arms. McGuinness worked as a miner until 1983 when he was made redundant, all the time portraying – in sketches (made compulsively as soon as the day underground was over), drawings, oils, and, latterly, prints – the desolate comradeliness of wiry, huddling miners caged in narrow seams, many of them observed vigorously hewing at the coal face.
His early drawings of miners combine anatomical realism with an intimate sense of the emotional and physical demands of a both physically and psychologically exacting and strenuous way of life. These works include Hand Putter (charcoal, 1947) – showing a muscular figure straining with all his might to push a tub of coal, a job Tom was himself well used to; Miner Undressing (conté, 1947/48); and Miner Washing in front of Fire (conté, 1948), his arched back illuminated in the firelight.
One of his rare self-portraits – a fresh, sketchy 1950s picture painted on the back of a finished oil painting – is a moving study of a sensitive-looking man. The delicate line marking the contours of his head is beautifully wrought, and the painting of his electric blue cardigan and a lemon yellow background shows an early predilection for vivid, expressionist colours. In its green highlights, the 1959 self-portrait in the Borchard Collection portends a growing, later tendency for glazed, luminescent greens and yellows in the portrayal of miners working underground – his gift for evoking a visionary iridescence in the gloom.
With its firmly delineated contours and subtle palette, his 1954 oil painting of an archetypal young Miner (Collection: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima)) is a brilliantly understated portrayal of a wiry young man at rest, a black pit helmet on his head, wearing a black jacket, and work gear (an orange top and blue trousers) – his arms folded in weariness after, no doubt, a long stint working underground. The picture affectingly evokes both the innate dignity and muscular fatigue of this hard-working man.
A 1958 painting, Pithead Bath (Collection: Bishop Auckland Town Hall), is remarkable for its unsentimental candour and strikingly original composition: it shows a frontal nude close-up of an undressed miner (whose head is not visible) and in the distance a naked back view of another man. The white-tiled cubicles form a stark setting – besides two small hanging towels, the only other main detail is a pair of heavy work boots set on the rough bathhouse floor.
Ruth Borchard kept a catalogue of McGuinness's 'First London Exhibition' – at the John Whibley Gallery in 1972 – opened by Lord Robens, ex-Chairman of the National Coal Board. In stringently designed panoramic oil paintings of mining villages and distant yet nevertheless looming hills, McGuinness portrayed local people of all ages and types with simultaneous affection and detachment. They appear often as sinuously stylised, often attenuated figures halfway between gritty realism and a poignantly expressive naivety of style.
Mining Review, the National Coal Board's news and magazine series, made a short, artful film in 1972 as a tribute on the occasion of McGuinness's first major London show This begins with a shot of Cork Street in London's West End (with its many art galleries), and then shows McGuinness's pictures being hung in the John Whibley Gallery. The voiceover states: 'Within minutes of the official Opening, not a single picture was to remain unsold.'
The film then shifts to the backyard of the artist's house in Bishop Auckland, and he is seen kissing his wife on the cheek before going out with his sketchbook to observe and draw local scenes. There follow wonderfully atmospheric shots of people of all ages in the cobbled, terraced streets. 'Tom's people are tall and gaunt, complementing the background in which he places them. The wider outdoors attracts Tom too, and the pastimes which have become a tradition among all British mining folk [the film cuts here to a scene of the artist amidst a flurry of racing pigeons]. Much of Tom's work leads inevitably to the pithead, louring over the villages and their people. Tom himself is still drawn to the pit. He works as a development man underground at Fishburn Colliery. He's recaptured in oils often enough his daily walk to the mine [cut to an image of an intensely expressionist painting of bowed, cloth-capped miner figures trudging along in early morning darkness]. Five shifts a week underground don't leave him all the time he'd like for painting. But even as he gets ready to ride the rope [and he is seen here about to descend by lift deep into the mine], he is storing up new images to be reflected later in his painting. Tom McGuinness is a mining craftsman as well as an artist [here he is pictured drilling vigorously at the coal face]. And he's a family man who gets out in the Durham countryside with his children [there were three: Shaun, Corinne and Anthony] and, always, with his sketchbook [and in contrast to the grinding, airless confines of the pit here he and his young son are seen and heard exploring a wood by a river amid idyllic birdsong]. His art mirrors the whole art and scale of the pitman's life and the interests of a man who has been brought up in a marvellously varied school of disciplines.
'Back at home in the familiar terrace-end house in Short Street, Tom goes straight to his studio [he is observed here painting in details in large canvas compositions]. His main love is to work in oils, perhaps for the texture it allows him to achieve to alleviate the harshness of many of his subjects. He is a man who sees his surroundings through incisive and individual eyes.'
At this point the film moves to the 'glamorous' Opening evening of McGuinness's show in Cork Street. 'Those who flocked to his London show were privileged to enter a world far removed from their own. Lord Robens, former Chairman of the Coal Board, was a guest of honour. Industry and the arts joined in paying tribute to this significant artist miner.' We see here the formal photos being taken of Lord Robens, the artist and his young son: a somehow touching scene of affection and respect.
Many other successful one-man shows followed in London and elsewhere over the years. His art was featured in the BBC’s Omnibus Series, and in Channel Four’s ‘Everyone a Special Type of Artist’, a series which, as John Albert Walker has written, ‘featured non-professional, spare-time creators from the working class’. The exhibition ‘Mines a McGuinness’ at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, in 1997 marked the publication of an extensive and illuminating book on his life and work: Tom McGuinness: the art of an underground miner (Gemini Productions, 1997) by Robert McManners and Gillian Wales.
In the exhibition catalogue for another exhibition in 1972, 'Figurative Arts North' at the Laing Gallery, Newcastle (for which McGuinness contributed five works), he is quoted as saying, 'I find it difficult to express any feelings in words, that's why I paint. I put my feelings into my paintings and my art mirrors my life in the mining community [...] I have always tried to express the feeling of restlessness in my work, the movement of the miners to and from the pit. Underground the roof lowers, the girders bend, the miner stoops and the cycle continues.'
It was in the early 1970s that McGuinness began to develop a self-taught etching style, and then to experiment with lithography. Print-making proved the perfect medium for him to evoke the quite visionary contrasts between lamplight and velvety blackness, the claustrophobic conditions underground, as well as the 'restlessness [...] the movement of the miners to and from the pit'.
Miners and Spiders, a 1991 etching and aquatint, is an extraordinary close-up view of two miners' heads, which appear eerily skull-like in their dark underground setting. The artistic antecedents of these would seem to be caricatural heads in a Daumier cartoon, or wraith-like labourers in a German Expressionist drawing. In a 1981 etching and aquatint of featureless night-shift miners crossing a valley towards pithead structures spread wirily on the glowing horizon, two cruciform telegraph poles – pitch black structures against the sky – subtly carry inescapable religious resonances.
During the 1980s McGuinness also made a series of 'Crucifixion' etchings, showing Christ on the Cross against a night sky, being watched by northern mining folk in modern dress. In 1988, he was commissioned to make designs for eight stained-glass windows and a tabernacle with enamelled panels for a chapel in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. In their 1997 book, McManners and Wales wrote: 'He introduced contemporary images into biblical scenes. For example, his depiction of The Last Supper [...] shows colliery winding gear above Christ's head. In his original designs for the panel of the tabernacle the scene depicting the betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane featured riot police and was an implicit reference to the police action in the 1984 Miners' Strike.'
In the Guardian (11th September 2017), Maeve Kennedy reported that 'A unique collection of paintings by Durham miners [...] will go on display in the first museum in the UK dedicated to such art.
'The museum is being created in a former bank building on the marketplace in Bishop Auckland […]
'The collection began when a man came into the Bishop Auckland library and asked the librarian Gillian Wales if he could put something on the noticeboard. “He gave me a bit of paper which I unfolded, expecting to read about a community show or a charity jumble sale – and instead I was astonished to read that he was a painter, and his own work was going into an exhibition in London,” she recalled. The man was Tom McGuinness.
'Later, in conversation with Bob McManners, a GP in the town, she discovered he was equally fascinated by McGuinness. The pair were so startled by the quality of his work, his knowledge and the seriousness with which he took his vocation – he hitched lifts to evening art classes after shifts and frequently walked miles home afterwards – that they bought a painting each. As they discovered more painters, including [Norman] Cornish, they bought more and more pictures, began writing about the artists and set up their own imprint to publish the books.
'Wales and McManners’ collection of more than 400 works, valued at more than £600,000, has been transferred to a new trust, Gemini, and will be permanently displayed in the handsomely converted bank building.'
Gill Holloway (1928-1914) – an art teacher who had met McGuinness in 1956, and taught and encouraged him and other notable mining artists at evening classes – wrote in her introduction to the 1997 book, Tom McGuinness: the art of an underground miner:
Tom McGuinness is a quiet, shy man with a marvellous smile which forty years ago or more intrigued me, for here was this young miner who after a punishing shift at the pit could travel miles and come along with a fresh enquiring mind eager to know more, more about painting, more about the major artists of the past, more about their methods and techniques and [...] ideas. One could almost see learning and thinking and yet he would still smile, understanding and grasping so much but saying so little. Even then, in those very early years, his paintings of the mine were exciting and original, for strangely enough out of this gentle young man came an enormously evocative and powerful art.
- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004