Interview - Harry Malkin: Putting life at the coalface on to canvas and into galleries

Harry Malkin spent 20 years working at the coal face.

While many artists find their muse in the shape of a lover, or nature’s raw beauty, the inspiration behind his work comes from a mile underground where death is only a breath away.

Born in Castleford, a stone’s throw from Henry Moore, Malkin started working in Fryston pit two weeks after leaving school when he was 15 and spent the next 20 years as a miner.

It’s no surprise then that his subsequent artwork should attempt to shine a light on this unseen, claustrophobic and dangerous world.

“It’s something I always come back to as it has a lot of strong memories for me. My father was a miner, his father was a miner and I came from a mining village.

“It was in the blood, you got the call as soon as you were big enough to move a barrow,” he says.

Malkin’s drawings and paintings, like the men he depicts, have a muscular feel that comes from the sheer unremitting effort required to tear a living from the bowels of the earth.

His latest exhibition, A Life Underground: Workings from the Coalface, goes on display in York from tomorrow and features 15 works inspired by his past life.

But if mining was in his blood so, too, was the urge to create. “I have always drawn and made things for as long as I can remember.

“I bumped into an old friend the other day and he reminded me of doing a greyhound sculpture in the snow when I was a kid.”

Ironically it was the ruinous Miners’ Strike of 1984 and 85 that paved the way for his career as an artist.

“That was a big turning point for me because the pit closures gave me the time and impetus to carve out another way of making a living.”

After the strike finished Malkin, along with thousands of other miners, was out of work. He became involved with the Yorkshire Art Circus and in 1989 his first major exhibition, at the Royal Festival Hall in London, garnered wide acclaim.

“I try to convey a sense of the claustrophobic, damp, awful conditions and the twisted metal of the girders which are a reminder of all that weight above you,” he says of his work.

“Even at the time most people didn’t know what it was like working down the pits, it was like going to the moon. I’ve got a young lad now who’s two years old and he’s been born into a completely different world and to some extent it’s a way of passing on memories from a world that has all but disappeared.”

A Life Underground: Workings from the Coalface is on show at According to McGee, York, to March 28.

Portrait of a mining life

Harry Malkin was born in Castleford and became a miner when he was 15, like his father and grandfather.

He started at Fryston pit, in West Yorkshire, where he worked as a mechanic.

Since becoming an artist his work has been exhibited at venues such as the National Coal Mining Museum, in Wakefield, and Dean Clough, in Halifax.