Cook, Beryl

Cook, Beryl (1926– ). British naive painter, born in Reading. She took up painting seriously in early middle age: ‘I was happily settled at home, and with my son away at college I had plenty of spare time. There was also the incentive of all the bare walls in our cottage [at Looe in Cornwall], and the driftwood from the beach provided an ideal material to paint on.’ Soon she was ‘painting compulsively'. In 1975 she had her first exhibition, at the Plymouth Arts Centre, and it was a great success. Within a few years she was well known through other exhibitions, television appearances, and the publication of the first of several collections of her work in book form (The Works, 1978), with the paintings accompanied by her own amusing captions. Her chubby, usually jovial characters have also been much used on greetings cards. Cook's subjects are taken from everyday life and often involve the kind of saucy humour associated with seaside holidays (she used to run a boarding house in Plymouth) and with tabloid Sunday newspapers (sometimes she incorporates real pieces of newsprint in her pictures as a collage element). Edward Lucie-Smith described her as ‘the nicest thing to happen to British painting for years'.