"Generally, you get two versions of England in art: it's either bucolic vistas, rolling hills, babbling brooks and gambolling sheep or it's downtrodden, browbeaten, grim poverty and misery. But Beryl Cook saw something else in all the drizzle and grey of this damp old country: she saw joy. The thing is, joy doesn't carry the same critical, conceptual heft in art circles as more serious subjects"
"Cook ran a guesthouse on the Hoe, the city's historic waterfront district, and in the 1970s filled it to bursting with paintings. Her earlier works here are a little timid, uncertain and messy. But by 1974, Beryl is Beryl, assured and confident. All the hallmarks are there: drinking, dancing, dressing up, laughing. Her characters are all big and plump, their bosoms are bursting, their eyes are cartoonish dots, their noses are sausage-y blobs."
Beryl Cook found and celebrated joy in damp, grey England rather than bucolic or downtrodden tropes. She painted bawdy, boozy, knee-slapping scenes populated by large, plump, uniformly styled figures with cartoonish eyes and exaggerated noses. Early works were tentative, but by 1974 her confident visual language had solidified. A 1975 opportunity to clear paintings led to a Plymouth Art Centre show, a Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, magazine covers, children's books and an OBE. Critical circles treated the work as popular postcard art, but public appeal and commercial success followed. Plymouth marked her centenary with a celebratory event.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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