Bob Orley was at the Battle of Orgreave 40 years ago. “I saw acts of violence,” he said, shaking his head. “When I saw the police’s actions, I thought I was in a foreign country. It’s hard to believe that it happened in this country.”
He is remembered for the brutality he and others witnessed on June 18, 1984, when striking miners encountered 6,000 baton-wielding police on horseback and on foot. Dew. It was still on his mind years later when he began responding to Picasso’s Guernica, one of the world’s greatest works of art.
The resulting painting, Orgreave After Guernica (2018), was displayed in an exhibition exploring the end of coal mining and its impact on local communities.
It features an unsettling presence in a show called The Last Cage Down, which opened at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike. It has become.
The police officer’s eyes follow the viewer around the room. “People say it makes them feel uneasy when they see it,” Oley said. “It’s not going to be everyone’s favorite, but I’ve never had anyone say ‘I don’t like it.’ That painting achieved what I wanted.”
Ollie, like many artists who are widely represented in exhibitions and gallery collections, did not follow a traditional career path. He went down the mine at the age of 16 and ended up… whitburn collieryNear South Shields there was a tunnel that ran for three miles under the North Sea. “I had to get in and out.”
He was fired in 1968, but did not regret it. “I see how the industry is going,” he said. “We were ready to pack up. That was the year the government closed more pits than in the history of coal mining.”
He left school without any qualifications, but while working as a miner he took a correspondence course in magazine illustration and decided to build a career in London.
He lasted five minutes, and one of the first people he encountered was Marjorie Proops, who would later become the Daily Mirror’s legendary aunt in distress. Her advice to Ollie didn’t help, he said. “She said, ‘Is she from the north?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, “I recommend that she return soon.” ”
Perhaps that was good advice, because on his return to the North East of England a light had been lit in his head to paint what he knew, such as northern working-class life and the coal mines. . He began to earn money and was especially successful at a job called “. Westoe Nettie.
Other works in the new exhibition include an explosively colored protest painting by Marjorie Arnfield entitled Women in Protest (1985), and works by Tom McGuinness and Barry Ormsby. It will be done.
After newsletter promotion
There are also works by prominent Russian constructivists. Kirill SokolovHe married a British woman and moved to the north-east of England.
The show was curated by gallery founders Gillian Wales and Robert McManners, who are friends who started collecting mining art several years ago before founding the gallery as part of the Auckland Project.
This is a remarkable and important art collection that would otherwise be widely dispersed.
In many cases, the works were never intended to be anything other than to provide catharsis and joy. “We’ve been collecting art that was hidden under people’s beds and in the back of their wardrobes,” Wales said. “One artist’s work was stacked up against the outside.”
