Tom McGuinness
Artist and coal miner Tom McGuinness was born at Witton Park near Bishop Auckland in 1926.
At 18 he was conscripted as a Bevin Boy (a young man selected by ballot to work in a coal mine instead of in conventional military service) during World War II. When his supervisor from the mines saw his drawings, he recommended attending evening art classes. McGuinness studied under Ralph Leslie Swinden R.A. at the Darlington School of Art four nights a week. He briefly joined the Spennymoor Settlement, where his ‘Pitman Painter’ contemporaries included Norman Cornish, Herbert Dees and Robert Heslop. The Settlement provided free classes and community groups and was an outlet for creativity in an area affected by unemployment and poverty.
Tom was painting seriously and when he took his portfolio to London in 1948, was offered a seven-year apprenticeship as a commercial artist, but instead decided to return to the coal mines. He worked as a miner for 39 years, making sketches at the end of the workday and spending his free time turning them into prints and paintings. His work depicts the reality of life working the coal seams through various media including oil paint, drawing and printmaking.
‘I find it difficult to express myself in words. That’s why I paint. I put my feelings into my paintings and my art mirrors my life in the mining community.’ – Tom McGuinness
In 1949 he showed his work for the first time at the Artists of the Northern Counties exhibitions at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and the Federation of Northern Arts Societies’ exhibitions at the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead. Tom’s solo exhibition at Wibley Gallery in London was a sell-out show and achieved huge critical acclaim. His exhibition ‘Mines a McGuinness’ at the Bowes Museum in 1997 marked the publication of an exhaustive account of his life and work ‘Tom McGuinness - the art of an underground miner’.
Tom died in 2006 aged seventy-nine. His death came just two months before a major retrospective of his work at Bishop Auckland Town Hall in honour of his 80th birthday. In 2018 Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, exhibited his painting of Murton Colliery in her office in Durham. His work is included in several major public galleries, including Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Shipley Art Gallery.
Exhibitions at Gallagher & Turner:
30th Anniversary Exhibition
Coal Hewer
Etching