13/05/2026
Hot off the press! Tom McGuinness - The art of an underground miner - Robert McManners and Gillian Wales.
Tom McGuinness worked as a coalminer in theSouth Durham Coalfield for forty years. During thattime he systematically recorded life underground.Our document records the artistic merit, the technical skills, the achievements and significance of a remarkable man and a very important artist. Tom has documented an industry that has beenconsigned to history. His images remain as a personal record of the miner’s life. He painted as a true artist – for himself. He expandedhis technical repertoire to include sophisticated forms of printing. Tom saw the world in a distortion of reality, his workcolleagues are bent, almost cowed, by their awesome task. Their twilight subterranean world is illuminated by an eerie, ethereal light. His desire to chronicle the miner’s lot inspired a working pitman to produce the best, most accurate and comprehensive artistic record of an industry extant.
‘In the future people will use Tom’s work like Lowry’sas a social commentary,’ wrote Bill Johnson, art criticof the Manchester Guardian, whilst art historian,Gill Holloway observed, ‘Tom is a powerfulexpressionist painter… Great writers of the past haveoften shown that much beauty and meaning can berevealed in the tragic and so it is evident in Tom’s work. He raises his paintings far above the representational, far above the mere accurate record of coalmining, thus they become valuable works of art. Tom has much in common with many of the major artists of the past.’
Fellow artist and collier, mining historian Aidan Doyle,simply observed, ‘I try to paint our mining heritage;Tom is our mining heritage.’
