Beryl Cook OBE

Beryl Cook was born in 1926 in Surrey, England, one of four sisters. She left school, where she had shown little talent for painting, at the age of fourteen, and worked at a variety of jobs, moving to London in 1943. Beryl worked briefly as a show girl in a touring production of ‘the Gypsy Princess’, she also worked in the fashion industry which inspired her life-long interest in the way people dress and look.

Beryl left London in 1946 and married John, a childhood friend who was in the merchant Navy, he retired from the sea and for a short time they ran a pub. Their son John was born in 1950, the following year they left to live in Southern Rhodesia. This move was to prove a turning point for Beryl, one day she picked up some paints belonging to her son and started a picture, she found she enjoyed it tremendously and could not stop, she painted on every available surface, scraps of wood, mirror frames, even on bread board.

The Cooks moved to Zambia in 1963 and then returned to England to live in Cornwall when Beryl began to paint in earnest, they eventually moved to Plymouth, where in the summer months they ran a busy theatrical boarding house. Beryl loved Plymouth, a thriving, lively seaside town full of pubs, fishermen and sailors a myriad of interesting characters, she and John enjoyed going to their local pubs and watching flamboyant drag acts.

Beryl would concentrate on painting in the winter months, and was eventually persuaded by an antique dealer friend to let him try and sell a few of her paintings, to her surprise he sold them very quickly. They were painted on wood panels in oil, a medium she still uses today. Plymouth Art Centre came to hear about this local phenomenon and persuaded Beryl, with some difficulty to have an exhibition. She is a person who is full of the contradictions of her paintings, they are lively, flamboyant and thoroughly extrovert, she is shy, reticent and amazed by her own popularity. She prefers to quietly observe a crowd of people, her acute eye misses nothing, she records in minute detail scenes of everyday life, she has an almost photographic memory.

Beryl’s exhibition in Plymouth was enormously successful, her paintings so full of life and humour and thoroughly unpretentious were immediately appealing to people, they made them laugh. The show received a great deal of publicity, which resulted in an article in the Sunday Times Supplement, with one of her paintings of a barmaid on the cover. Soon after this, London’s Portal Gallery offered her an exhibition, they had specialised for many years in the work of British self-taught ‘primitive’/’naïve’ painters and Beryl Cook fitted exactly into this school.

So in 1976 Beryl Cook had her first London exhibition, it was a sell-out. Since then she has had eight exhibitions with Portal Gallery and her paintings now command upwards of £10,000, she has, much to her surprise and sometimes dismay, become an artist with an international reputation.
John Murray have published a number of books of her paintings, there are cards of her paintings which are distributed all over the world, and also silk-screen prints. She is featured in most important books on world naïve painting.

Beryl Cook’s work is particularly interesting when viewed in the context of other British social realist painters she could be described as a contemporary Hogarth or Gilray, although she is less cruel and grotesque and has a more sympathetic view of the human race, she is, like them, above all else a social observer, she records with an acute eye the human frailties and absurdities of human behaviour. This century the work of the illustrator Donald McGill, who’s saucy ‘seaside’ post cards are now widely collected is an obvious antecedent.

Beryl Cook greatly admires the work of the English visionary painter Stanley Spencer, and one can see this influence directly in the bold, bulky figures, and her round compositions and style owe something to him, though above all it is a subject matter that they have in common.

Though Burra has a dark, slightly salacious and sinister aspect, he too loved to paint sleazy cafes, night-clubs, markets overflowing with ripe fruit and vegetables, and the sailors and prostitutes that inhabit the underworld of Marseilles, Amsterdam and Barcelona. The appeal of Beryl Cook’s paintings is their directness, vulgarity and boisterousness, she is not a pretentious theory-ridden artist, her paintings are accessible and fun, not to be interpreted by esoteric art criticism. Her paintings are true folk art in the sane tradition as Brueghel, Stanley Spencer and the South American Artist Botero.