Retrospective exhibition for Ashington pitman painter

Posted by Simon Honeysett on Sep 29, 08 11:12 AM in News

The Deluge, an early Oliver Kilbourn painting THEIR friendship was forged through a love of art. Oliver Kilbourn was the miner who discovered an innate talent for capturing the world around him and William Feaver is an art critic who now favours landscape painting over writing.

Both self-taught artists, they are exhibiting together at the first retrospective of Oliver's work to be held at the Northumbria University Gallery. The exhibition spans Oliver's lifetime (1904-93) and includes his first watercolour for the Ashington Group (also remembered as the Pitmen Painters), The Deluge, done in 1935.

Oliver's mainly figurative scenes of the everyday lives of Ashington miners and their families contrast with William's landscapes of the wild and beautiful Allen Valley, Northumberland.

The pair met in 1971 at the Laing Art Gallery exhibition of the Helen Sutherland Collection of Modern Art which included work by the Pitmen Painters.

William attended the private view as art critic for The Journal and was invited to the Ashington hut where the art-loving miners gathered to see more work. He subsequently wrote the book Pitmen Painters, The Ashington Group 1934-1984, upon which Lee Hall based his hit play The Pitmen Painters.

William, 65, says: "We were very close friends and he always wanted to have a proper exhibition of his work by himself as an artist. Oliver's pictures are unique. He left school at 12 and spent all of his working life down the pit, but at the same time managed to produce touching, memorable, factually accurate work.

"As an artist he went through all the difficult phases when other people give up and came out the other side as his own man with his own style."

He adds: "The group itself was unique and he was the key member. What excited and stirred me was how passionate about art he and the group were. They wanted to know about other people's art and they weren't at all closed in. They were very inspiring."

William trained as a historian but spent every afternoon at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art while at college in Oxford.

He says: "I come from a long line of historians, including my mum's grandfather who was very eminent. He was Bishop Stubbs, the first medieval historian in Britain. He preached Queen Victoria's funeral sermon, caught the flu and died 10 days later.

"I always wanted to be a painter rather than a historian, but I realised a bit late."

William taught art and history at the Royal Grammar School in the 1970s but was eventually taken off art "for using up too many materials".

Soon after, he moved to the University of Newcastle as a post-doctoral research fellow and in 1975 published a book about the 19th Century Northumbrian painter, John Martin.

The Pitmen Painters was published in 1988 and William, who is an expert on Lucian Freud, became a renowned art critic before exhibiting his own paintings for the first time 10 years ago.

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