Beryl CookBERYL COOK, who has died aged 81, was one of Britain's most popular artists. She eschewed celebrity, preferring to see her distinctive, humorous works on greeting cards.
The Dolphin, in Plymouth, remained rough a generation after the other quayside pubs were done over for tourists. But on a Friday or Saturday night for almost three decades from 1970, there was a near-certainty that Cook would be there, with the trawlermen and the large ladies from Cattedown out on the razzle, guzzling crisps.
Cook would have sat in the seat by the door with John, whom she married in 1948. She sipped gin and tonic, and later in life beer, and smoked until ordered off when it threatened worse than deepening her raucous laugh. She slipped little white cards out of her handbag to record any exuberant ensemble - "I do love a bit of flash". She snapped John as a cover for photographing a detail of decor in other rowdy places - the clubs down Union Street, or during Ruby Venezuela's drag act at the gay Lockyer Tavern.
The Cooks dined on crab sandwiches, or in the fish and chip shop next door, and at closing time they woozily wove their way home to their house just off Plymouth Hoe. For the first 10 years, they ran the house as a bed and breakfast, expanding it thereafter to fill it with Victoriana and a definitive collection of cruets. After the housework and breakfast, she fled upstairs to paint until the light went, six days a week.
Whether on excursions to Littlewoods or cruising down Armada Way, all she ever wanted to do was get home, "bolt up the stairs like a gazelle" and record her observations. This involved two weeks of drawing and painting on marine three-ply board, two foot by three, starting at the top and rushing forward to "the whopping great figure in the foreground". After the first two days, she said, there was always the realisation that the work would be a dud. But she finished it anyway.
Two decades later her work featured on postage stamps along with Renoir and Rodin, but never in the Tate or the national galleries. The chief criticism was that she was not serious - nobody in a Cook painting is having a bad, sad time. The critic Brian Sewell remarked that hers was a "very successful formula which fools are prepared to buy", anti-art without "the intellectual honesty of an inn sign for the Pig and Whistle - a vulgar streak".
This, and the other accusations, came from a Romantic attitude to art, believing it to be for angry or melancholy self-expression - based on the assumption that Cook considered herself an artist, which she did not: "maker of pictures" was her description. She did not read reviews, she did not even like to know how much her work fetched, because it made her feel responsible. What if the buyers had spent all that money and then hated the purchase? She was more in sympathy with the reproduction of her work as greeting cards.
Painting was her life and pleasure, not her career. It was a therapeutic release for her anxieties, it allowed her (and John) a wild, extrovert, fantasy existence. Through paint she was not just an amused voyeur of generations of girls on the pull - "I love to see people enjoying themselves" - and older women who were not moping at home but cheering Ivor Dickey, the male stripper. She also depicted herself as she never really was, going ballroom-dancing, or cheerleading with rocket thighs beneath hotpants.
Cook's self-portraits show her as plump, which she was not. She added three stone to all her figures to avoid filling in backgrounds - location did not enthuse her. She liked "reaching in and picking up" her rounded people - "I do think large is gorgeous" - so her sailors wrapped their fingers, like a pound of sausages, round their beer glasses, and her Soho tarts were as soft as dough, their eyes iced with make-up.
Her style was, in fact, utterly unromantic. It was folk baroque, an unsentimental record of fun - life's brief, affluent and hormonal seasons. "I see a lot of sad things, but I wouldn't be motivated to paint them. When I feel uneasy, I laugh," she explained.
Cook was born in Surrey. Her father deserted her mother and her three sisters for his other wife and child, leaving the family poor in Reading, Berkshire, although still able to go up to London to galleries and ballet. John moved into the house next door when Beryl was 10. They threw things at each other over the wall, and she did what girls did - left Kendrick girls' school at 14, took shorthand-typing and helped her mother run a tea garden.
Marrying John, by then in the merchant navy, at 22 seems to have been her refuge, safe in a shared sense of humour. The Cooks had a son, John, in 1950 and ran a pub together for a year before emigrating to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where John's company posted him to Ndola in the copper belt of newly independent Zambia.
There, one Christmas, he bought his wife, who was working as a bookkeeper, a set of children's oil paints. She did one picture, an Indian girl with her breasts hanging over a barrier, copied from an illustration, and pinned it on a door, but after that the paints stayed unused until the couple returned to England in 1963, to a cottage on the harbour in Looe, Cornwall.
Here, John went into the motor trade and Beryl, unable to find a job, began to paint compulsively. "Everyone else was painting in Cornwall," she said. "I expected to paint like Stanley Spencer. It was a great disappointment when I realised that I didn't." Her other influences were James Thurber and Donald McGill, the early 20th-century saucy seaside postcard artist.
In 1970 the Cooks moved to Plymouth, and a friend sold 10 of Beryl's paintings at £20 each. But Beryl had no desire to exhibit. She thought a hospital waiting-room might like her work, and she let BB guests assume that her husband or son was responsible for the raunchy scenes around the house. An actor guest appearing at Plymouth Arts Centre told its director, Bernard Samuels, that he should see the paintings, and husband John brought one along, of three sunbathers in the back garden, to an open show.
There turned out to be 75 works in Beryl's house, along with plums painted on both sides of the lavatory seat. She avoided the resultant solo exhibition opening in 1975, and painted with sudden energy because she was "desperate to cover the walls again". A regional TV report brought the Sunday Times colour magazine, the Portal gallery, the South Bank Show and the books, postcards and the fan mail.
The first effect of her fame was taking down the BB sign. Any increase in wealth was immaterial, except for buying the house next door. "I've always thought I was just like the queen. I had pictures on the walls, plenty of books because we bought them off stalls, and gnomes in the garden, so I'd got my sculptures. It's just on a smaller scale than Buckingham Palace. It's no good me coming out with glittering diamonds."
She would be up all night with worry before an interview, and bought propitiatory chocolate cakes for visiting journalists to distract attention from her lack of "a lurid lifestyle - no dozens of lovers, no girlfriend hidden in the wardrobe - I don't take drugs and I'm not into bondage".
In 1995 she achieved the formal recognition of an OBE, and the popular accolade of television came when the BBC broadcast two animated films, based on her characters, Bosom Pals, in 2004.
It took the Cooks 27 years to leave Plymouth, for a coach house in Clifton, Bristol, near their granddaughter and three great-grandchildren. But while Bristol was more convenient for the working trips to London, after four years she was back in Plymouth. She died peacefully at her home there.
For her handsome women have everything but fat in common with the happy skeletons who celebrate the inevitability of the grave in Mexican folk art. Her husband and son survive her.
Eleanor Beryl Cook: born September 10th, 1926; died May 28th, 2008