THE work of a Spennymoor-born pitman artist is being celebrated in the month of his 85th birthday.

Norman Cornish's distinctive scenes of life in a County Durham mining community are featured in an exhibition that runs until November 28 at Sunderland's Museum and Winter Gardens.

The Art of Norman Cornish, a project between Tyne and Wear Museums and the University Gallery of Northumbria University, features portraits of local figures, pub scenes and miners.

Forming a visual record of a colliery community over seven decades, the collection is a comprehensive retrospective of the life and work of Mr Cornish.

Born in 1919, he began work as a miner at the age of 14, when he became an apprentice at the Dean and Chapter Colliery. He worked in several collieries in the Durham Coalfield over the following 33 years, spending his days in the mine and his weekends painting.

On his retirement from the pit, he was able to devote more time to his passion for painting.

Although the distinctive locations of his younger days are transformed, he hopes to offer a glimpse of life in a bygone era through his paintings.

He said: "The local collieries have gone, together with the old pit road. Many of the old streets, chapels and pubs are no more. Many of the ordinary, but fascinating people who frequent these places are gone.

"However, in my memory, and I hope in my drawings, they live on."