Their new work currently in rehearsals is called PITMAN and is inspired by the world famous Pitmen Painters who just so happen to come from a mining town in Northumberland called Ashington, also home to Loud and Flashy!
The following information is from Wikipedia:
The Ashington Group was a small society of artists from
Ashington, Northumberland, which met regularly between 1934 and 1984. Despite
being composed largely of miners with no formal artistic training, the Group
and its work became celebrated in the British art world of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Group began as the Ashington branch of the Workers'
Educational Association (WEA), which first advertised a class on 'Evolution' in
1927; after a further seven years of evening classes in various subjects they
turned their attention to art appreciation. The WEA and Durham University
organised for a tutor, the painter and teacher Robert Lyon (1894-1978) to come
and instruct the group, but its members, mainly miners from the Woodhorn and
Ellington Collieries, quickly grew dissatisfied with the course. Lyon suggested
that the group members instead try creating their own paintings as a means to
develop an understanding and appreciation of art.
By 1936 the group - many of whose members were committed
to the principles of the Independent Labour Party - had drawn up an extensive
list of regulations, by which all members had to abide, and named itself the
Ashington Group; it also held its first exhibition at Armstrong College,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A further exhibition was held in 1938 as an extension of
the Mass Observation project.
By the early 1940s the Group had exhibited in London, and
continued to thrive after Lyon left to teach in Edinburgh, though he remained
in contact with the Group's members. Over the next few years the work of the
Group was noticed and praised by a number of prominent British artists and
critics, such as Julian Trevelyan and Henry Moore.
After World War II, critical interest in the Group waned,
but they continued to meet weekly, producing new art and taking on new members.
The critic William Feaver met one of the Group's central members, Oliver
Kilbourn, in the early 1970s, and began a renewal of interest in their work,
which was restored and featured in several touring exhibitions. In the 1980s,
the Group's "Permanent Collection" became the first western
exhibition in China after the Cultural Revolution!
The Group's meeting hut was finally demolished in 1983;
Kilbourn, the last of the Group's founder members, arranged for the paintings
to be put in trust prior to his death in 1993, and they are now kept in
Woodhorn Colliery Museum. Feaver's book about the Group, Pitmen Painters: The
Ashington Group 1934-1984, has been adapted into a successful play by Lee Hall.
The paintings are viewable free at Woodhorn Museum near
Ashington, Northumberland.
'The Bowler' by Len Robinson was chosen by Eliot Smith Company to be the inspiration for their promotional artwork after Eliot visited the collection at Woodhorn. Yamit Salazar tried his best to look like the character in the painting! Arriving with a child's soft rubgy ball for a prop that needed to look like an antique bowling ball certainly gave me a challenge in Photoshop!
Below is the original painting by Len Robinson along with the image created in the studio, both before and after photoshop!
The full set of images will be shown as soon as they've been edited.
Len Robinson - The Bowler
Yamit Salazar of the Eliot Smith Company with photoshopped bowling ball!
If you'd like some commercial or personal photography, get in touch, but go and see some amazing art and social history at the Woodhorn Museum first!
