ARTS: Eighteen plain-speaking coalminers took an art appreciation course – and then took up paintbrushes to prove a point. Their story is on stage in Dublin's theatre festival, which starts tonight, writes Arminta Wallace
WHAT DO YOU get when you sign up for an evening class? Well, it depends. Sometimes we choose a subject with which we’re reasonably familiar. At other times, we hope to be stretched out of our comfort zone. But the group of coal miners who signed up for an art appreciation class in a small Northumberland town in 1934 would surely never have guessed that they would end up as a “school” of art.
Picture the scene. Some 18 tough-talking, no-nonsense men settle down obediently in the classroom as their tutor projects a series of scratchy black-and-white slides on to a screen. The images are of well-known Renaissance paintings and sculptures, many with religious or mythological themes. To put it mildly, the men are not impressed. There are a few hostile comments, a couple of black looks. If you were the tutor, you’d probably feel like running off screaming into the night, never to return. But this tutor, Robert Lyon, is made of sterner stuff. Okay, he tells his reluctant students, if you think all this art carry-on is so easy, why don’t you have a go at doing it yourself? It was the beginning of what was to become known as the Ashington Group.
The story of what was to become known as the Ashington Group is told in a play called The Pitmen Painters, which will be performed at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival next week. In 2006, the playwright Lee Hall – author of the hugely successful musical and film, Billy Elliot– was commissioned to write a piece for the reopening of the Live Theatre in Newcastle. Browsing in second-hand bookshops on London's Charing Cross Road one day, he came across a copy of The Pitmen Painters, by art critic William Feaver, which had been published almost two decades years earlier. Hall realised at once that he had found the ideal subject for his play.
“But he had to get round me to start with,” says Feaver. “He had to get my trust, because there had been attempts before that to do Ashington Group plays – and they’d been pretty embarrassing.”
Feaver first encountered the painters of the Ashington Group when he was working in Newcastle as a teacher and art critic.
“I met these elderly men at an opening, a private view in an art gallery,” he says. “ They were completely out of place because they were from outer Newcastle and they’d got their overcoats on. They gathered round me and started telling me about their work.”
The men invited Feaver to come along to Ashington, which is about 20 miles from Newcastle, and see their work for himself.
“Dark; got lost; an obscure hut down a rutted track,” is how he sums up the journey. Inside the hut, however, the scene was different. “It was all warmth and light and a fire being lit. There were about eight or nine of them there. They just started pulling out these pictures – and I was absolutely overwhelmed by them, because they were such good pictures.”
The men also showed him their collection of art books, on a wide range of subjects, from Bridget Riley to neolithic cave painting. Feaver was impressed.
“Some journalists – particularly journalists from the south – have written about these painters as heroic figures with coal all over their faces, standing with their helmets on, painting away. Which they weren’t at all. They were wearing their best suits, and they painted at home.”
Nor, in truth, were they as naive as the “coal miners sign up for art appreciation class” story might suggest. At least some of the men were veterans of evening classes, their interest having been sparked by a Workers’ Educational Association poster they saw in 1927 which advertised a course on the topic of evolution.
For the next seven years they studied various subjects until – as one of their number, Harry Wilson, put it – “We were are at a dead end again, so we started on art”.
Feaver, who became friendly with various members of the group – especially Oliver Kilbourn, who was to become a central character in Hall’s play – is unstinting in his praise of them.
“Oliver was like a father to me for many years,” he says. “And overall they were some of the most impressive people I have ever met. They weren’t DH Lawrence working-man artefacts at all. They would not be patronised in any respect, ever. They were proud of their jobs, proud of their community – not uncritical, but very much standing on their own feet.”
ALL OF THEAshington Group painters are now dead. Their work can, however, be seen at the Ashington Colliery Museum, of which Feaver is a trustee, where 100 pictures are on permanent display. In the art world there is often, even now, profound distrust of work which comes from outside the accepted value system. In the 1930s this was even more pronounced, with the phrase "unprofessional painters" often used to indicate that a body of work might be somehow slightly dodgy. As a critic, was Feaver not inclined – at least initially – to be wary of these highly opinionated outsiders?
“Not at all,” he says. “I’m an unprofessional painter myself, so I think I probably did have the slight advantage of having a foot in each camp.”
In retrospect, can he say how much of the success of the Ashington Group was the result of their technique as painters and how much was down to their subject matter?
“Looking back,” he says, “the subject is brilliant. This unique way of life which everybody took for granted then. The biggest industry in Britain was coal mining – and that disappeared, in effect. They weren’t to know, we weren’t to know, even 30 years ago, that this was going to become a kind of weird time capsule, this life underground.
“And so the way they painted, which was very straightforward, not to worry too much about style but just get it down – and get it down without trying to make things pretty or attractive or decorative – these are such very good sound basic principles that I suppose almost automatically their work became interesting. So it was partly the subject matter, but partly the way that Robert Lyon encouraged them to not to pick up tips on how to paint but to work it out for themselves.”
The paintings are as varied as the painters, but if they have one thing in common it’s that they use big, bold colours and shapes.
“Lyon got them doing a bit of lino-cutting because he thought, I suppose – with some arrogance, in retrospect – that these were working chaps and they’d be more comfortable if they were working with their hands rather than being lah-di-dah with brushes. But that only lasted a few weeks. They did some woodcutting and a bit of sculpture. Again, not so lah-di-dah as painting.
“But fairly soon they got around to getting household emulsion and plywood and so on – just whatever was around the place. I mean, they’d got no money, it was all done on a shoestring. And partly because they hadn’t got any money and couldn’t afford Windsor and Newton painting sets and easels, and all of that, it kept them close to the ground. And the pictures are all the better for that.”
In the 1980s, Feaver brought a selection of the paintings to China at the invitation of the Chinese ministry of culture.
“It was the first exhibition of western art in China since the Cultural Revolution – and they went down extremely well,” he says. “But, in China, what they call ‘peasant art’ or ‘folk art’ is actually very highly schooled and trained and pretty. So they thought these paintings were rather crude.”
Feaver prefers the description “honest and straightforward”. He would say the same about Lee Hall’s play, which has evolved a good deal since it was first mooted four years ago. Feaver notes that every production, including the show which is coming to Dublin, brings slight tweaks and improvements, “little details which just make it ring that bit more true. The actors have also brought their own stories to it. It has been an incredible journey – and a happy journey.”
ONE CONSTANT FEATURE, however, appears to be audience reaction. The Pitmen Paintersseems to appeal to everyone, from audiences in Newcastle through Gordon Brown to the London critics who gave it an Evening Standardaward for best new play.
“Lee has put the characters together brilliantly,” says Feaver. “The characters who appear on stage are a kind of amalgam. One or two of them are based on real characters, and at least one is made up. It’s a question of how many characters you can get away with from a casting point of view.
“But the reason people love it is that Lee has this way of writing, of being very funny, and then suddenly, imperceptibly, you find yourself in very deep water, with real issues being talked about in a practical, unpretentious way. I think it’s a terrific play. I would say that, I suppose. No. I’d be the first to say it was a crappy play if it wasn’t terrific.”
The National Theatre and Live Theatre Newcastle production ofThe Pitmen Painters , by Lee Hall, opens at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Tue, Oct 6 as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. On Oct 7, Roddy Doyle is in conversation with Hall after the show at approximately 10.15pm. dublintheatrefestival.com
