The World of Myth Magazine

Art history is not just big movements and great people. Sometimes little pockets of artists are in the same place and develop something that (while not wildly famous or influential on some kind of historic scale) is still worth talking about and appreciating.

There have been so many small, short lived circles or movements across the history of art it would be difficult to pick one to start off with, but one really I want to draw attention to is the Pitman Painters around the English county of Northumberland, and focused on the town of the Ashington.

Ashington is still a very working class town. The kind of place where (in some places at least) the rows and rows of old, cramped, cheap housing seems to stretch from horizon to horizon – in a maze of tightly condensed streets broken only by the occasional small shop, chip shop (a chippy) or a pub. Much of it looks and feels like it would have back in the depression era 1930s. It is not exactly the first place you might think to go to for artistic inspiration – but the Pitman Painters (also called The Ashington Group) found subjects and even beauty among this tough-living, industrial area in the north of England.

The Pitman Painters were a group of largely amateur artists who together produced hundreds of paintings showing what life was like in their under-privilaged, work-every-day communities. The movement started as an art appreciation class in 1934, through the Workers Education Association (or ‘the WEA’) a voluntary organization that still organizes classes and courses to teach adults new skills and develop existing ones for small fees. The tutor of the course in Ashington thought the best way to learn about art was to create it, and so that is what happened – and this made the classes surprisingly popular. So for the next 50 years these amateur artists would meet every week to paint and try out their new interest. Over the years a growing number of really talented artists developed, soon experimenting with different styles, techniques and materials, and using their lives and landscape as inspiration.

What began as a hobby soon found critical, and in some cases even commercial success. By the end of the 1930s, work by the ‘Pitman Painters’ was being featured in galleries in major cities. Some of them even developed serious and respected art careers.

However following WW2, interest in the group and their depictions of working class life in the industrial north started to wane, until it became just another note in the forever changing and evolving history of art. There are hundreds of almost forgotten stories and circles like this, but the work of the Ashington Group is still worth paying attention to – their work can still capture what real life can actually feel like, and can even find beauty in it.

What art is is very open to interpretation. If you were asked what it is, your response will very much depend on how much exposure you have had to different kinds and styles. A pile of rocks can be art to some, and in the right context, yet to others that very idea is laughable. As such talking about technical skill in art can also become tricky quickly, and some of the work of the Pitman Painters can seem quite crude and unrefined when you look at the small details. But is that because of a lack of skill/talent or is it simply that they were not trying to capture the world in a totally realistic way - like the Modernists a few decades earlier?

These painters were working class miners who lived hard and dangerous lives, often under the ground in endless dark tunnels. Because their work might sometimes look crude, and because these painters were of humble origins, it might be easy to snobbishly dismiss their work. I do not think this is either right or fair.

Art is fundamentally an expression of emotion. It can be ugly or beautiful, refined or simplistic, and anything in-between. Even though the subjects of these paintings are not traditionally beautiful things, the Pitman Painters were able to find beauty and hope in these scenes.

The Pitman Painters, the Ashington Group, were really a small miracle, especially considering how good quite a lot of their work actually is. It was even discussed seriously at length in a book by the art critic William Feaver in 1988, and has been the subject of a play written by Lee Hall in 2007. These poor miners from Ashington have left their mark on art history, and they really deserve more attention and appreciation. But it also makes you think, how many impressive works have been effectively lost, simply because they never got the attention they deserved? How much art do we really know about?