TRIBUTES have been paid to a well-known mining artist who graphically captured the brutal conditions at the coal face.

Tom Lamb, 87, a self-taught artist also known for his landscape paintings, has died following an illness at his home in Newton Hall, Durham City.

Dr Peter Norton, the author of Tom Lamb: The Biography of a Mining Artist, said: “Tom had a very hard life. He worked for 27 years in the thin seams of Durham – seams no thicker that one foot six inches.

“He was a very shy and retiring man, but a wonderful raconteur, who had good craic about times in the mine.

“But his art was the most important thing. Unlike any of the other mining artists, he kept sketchbooks when he was underground the whole 27 years he worked there.

He added: “The sketches are absolutely remarkable and formed the basis of his final oil paintings.”

“He always said he painted his mining scenes with what he called “a romantic realism inspired from a sense of apprehension and foreboding when working underground”.

“He got tremendous enjoyment from painting landscapes and social scenes too.”

“The nice thing is we have the legacy of all his wonderful paintings to remember him by.”

Mr Lamb was born in Pelton, near Chester-le-Street. His primary teacher recognised his talent and would hang large sheets of card on the walls for him to paint the changing seasons.

When he was in isolation in hospital with diphtheria his mother gave him his first sketchbook, further fuelling his lifelong passion.

On his 14th birthday he came home from school to hear his father say “I have got a job at the pit for the lad”.

He left school on the Friday and started the following Monday at the “screens”, handsorting coal from stone at Craghead Colliery.

When he first went down the colliery’s Busty pit he took three sketchbooks with him. His work gained a wider audience underground when he created “proper little art gallery” drawing on the whitewashed walls in axle grease.

With the closure of Craghead Colliery in 1969, Mr Lamb went to the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Art Gallery where he became an attendant and technician.

He was given the use of the art gallery for a retirement exhibition in 1993 and continued to paint, holding several large exhibitions – the last being My Mining Days at Durham University’s Grey College.

His wife Margaret said today (Wednesday, February 24): “He never had an art lesson in his life. We are so proud of him.

“He was a quiet and simple man who had quite simple needs. Everybody he met just loved him.”

Mr Lamb’s funeral service will be held at St Peter’s Church, Sacriston, at 11.30am on Thursday, March 3, followed by interment.