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| Andrew Foreman, The Bar – Playing Dominoes, 1936 |
by William Feaver
On the train to Ashington that afternoon in October 1934 Robert Lyon, Master of Painting at Armstrong College Newcastle (then part of Durham University) was in two minds as to how to proceed. Invited to teach art appreciation from scratch his immediate instinct was to lay on a feast of lantern slides: High Renaissance for beginners featuring Michelangelo, Leonardo and so on. Ashington was outside his orbit and the nearest he had ever got to consorting with coal miners was his friendship at the Royal College of Art with the son of a Yorkshire colliery official, a young sculptor called Harry, later known as Henry, Moore.
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George Blessed, Whippets, 1939
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Harry Wilson, Ashington Colliery, 1936 |
The WEA class that had asked to be supplied with a lecturer wanted to move on from Geology, Evolution, and other such topics. Forty or so turned up at the YMCA hall, an old army hut, for the first session, but only half that number the following week. The reason why so many dropped out right away was obvious. Lyon himself was the first to realize that there was no point in exposing details of the Sistine chapel to an audience completely unversed in art. It was agreed that instead of being idle hands looking at black and white projections of remote images on an improvised screen the men should try making images themselves. Lyon started them off on linocuts, reasoning that the business of gouging lines in resistant material would suit manual workers. And then breakthrough: he and the class came to an understanding. Given a subject (‘Deluge’, say, or ‘The Hermit’), each member would do a painting accordingly, to be discussed in class the following week. All at once Tuesday evenings became the focus of life outside of work. |
