Oliver kilbourn biography

Oliver Percival Kilbourn was a member of the inspirational group the Pitman Painters.  Born on this date in 1904, Kilbourn was a  British coal miner, painter, and founding member of the Ashington Group, otherwise known as the Pitman Painters.

Widely considered to be the group’s best-known artist, Kilbourn used his experience of  working as a miner to depict images of the world around him.

The Ashington Group  was a small society of artists based in Ashington, Northumberland (my home county!).  The men met regularly between 1934 and 1984 and despite the difficult conditions in which they lived – working class lives, hard, dangerous and manual work with long hours they became celebrated in the British art world of the 1930s and 1940s.

Wanting to educate themselves they started out as the Ashington branch of the Workers Educational Association, taking evening classes in various subjects but found a real love when they turned their attention to art appreciation.

The WEA and Durham University arranged for a tutor for the group, and painter and teacher Robert Lyon started by teaching the men about professional artists but switched tact and suggested that the men should try creating their own paintings as a means to develop an understanding and appreciation of art.  By the early 1940s they had exhibited in London.

A successful play toured the UK a few years ago and we were looking enough to see it when it opened in London – http://www.historytoday.com/robert-colls/british-working-class-painters-jimmys-blob

There is a good summary of The Pitmen Painters here

Oliver Percival Kilbourn (6 October 1904 – April 1993) was a British coal miner, painter, and founding member of the Ashington Group.

Widely considered to be the group's best-known artist, Kilbourn used the experiences that he had gained while working in the mines and represented them in his art work. His main contribution to the Ashington Group was his focus on Modern art.

Early life and family

Kilbourn was born in 75 Chestnut Street, Ashington, and was the fifth child of James Smith Kilbourn and Mary Hannah Chilton. After attending elementary school, he began working as a miner at the Duke pit, Ashington, three days after his thirteenth birthday. When Kilbourn was eleven, his father had an accident in the pit and damaged his back. He never worked again. Kilbourn was to become the "breadwinner more or less, maintaining the whole family on fourteen shillings a week till [his] sisters got jobs."

Coal mining

Kilbourn worked at the Duke pit for eleven years until its closure. William Feaver writes that after the Duke pit closed, "Kilbourn moved to the nearby Ellington collier, where he became a coalface drawer aged twenty-four. He remained at Ellington for the rest of his working life, becoming a salvage drawer during the Second World War and a wasteman, responsible for the maintenance of the mine's airways." Kilbourn retired from mining in 1968.

"I've spent shall we say about a third of my life in semi-darkness. The face now. You went in the morning and it was very very low. Some seams here were just about two feet. Well, you w

Posted by Bonza Rottwheeler on May 27, 2021

Tags: Ashington Group, Closure of UK coal mines, George Blessed, Independent Labour Party, Japanese coal mining (Fukuoka), Jimmy Floyd, Lee Hall, Leslie Brownrigg, Naive art, Norman Cornish, Northumberland coal miners, Oliver Kilbourn, Pitmen Painters, Robert Lyon, Sakubei Yamamoto, Shansi (China) mining, Social Realism (art), Tagawa History and Coal Museum, Thatcherite Britain, WEA, William Feaver, Woodhorn and Ellington collieries, Woodhorn Mining Museum

One of the more novel art genres to emerge in the first third of last century was the “Pitman Painters” phenomenon in northern England. Known as the Ashington Group✱, these were a small collective of unionised mine workers in county Northumberland who approached their local Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) seeking out tuition in new areas of education. Initially the pitmen were hoping WEA could find a economics professor to tutor them in the “dismal science”. When none could be arranged, their interest switched to learning painting and drawing.

⇡ ‘Coal Face’, Jimmy Floyd (1947) (Credit: Woodhorn Museum)

Artist and WEA teacher Robert Lyon took on the task of teaching the miners—mainly from the Woodhorn and Ellington collieries—all of whom had no formal art training. The workers however didn’t take to dry lectures on the Classical and Renaissance art, so Lyon adopted a more pragmatic approach of teaching the miners the basics of drawing and painting. Lyon advised the miners to simply “paint what they knew” ‘Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters’, Artist Biographies, www.artblogs.co.uk.

⇡‘Coal-Face Drawers’, Oliver Kilbourn (1950) (Image: TUC150.tuc.org.uk)

In 1934 the workers formed themselves into a small society of miner-artists who met weekly to paint and discuss their work. Most of the small group were adherents of th