This week ‘Larger than Life’ an exhibition at Bristol Museum of Beryl Cook’s work will draw to a close.
Beryl’s work is both popular and too easily dismissed by critics as cheeky, cheesy and cartoon-like.
An untrained and instinctive artist; Beryl’s paintings showed her acute observations of people, situations, emotions. She saw and celebrated life. Her paintings are bright, cheerful, extrovert and sometimes deeply sexual. Was this what Beryl was like?
A fascinating insight into Beryl and her work is through the film archive at the exhibition. She rarely gave interviews and avoided public events. The footage is rare. What comes over is a shy person who quietly observed, sketched and painted what she saw as a visual diary and of a way of expressing herself. In the film she describes getting into the characters she paints in a way she didn’t in real life. So when you see Beryl in the painting laughing and playing the piano, this is not a self portrait of her in life, but in spirit.
Perhaps her reserve resonates with a wider British reserve? And an explanation for her popularity is that we enjoy the characters in the pictures because their raucous behaviour in public is what we dream of getting away with too?
She may have not liked to talk about her work or analyse it but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at a deeper level than many suspect?
Personally I love her work because of her perspective on people. And I lived in Plymouth for 7 years so especially like to be reminded of my own times on Union street, in Diamond Lil’s, the Queens (pig pub) or the Dolphin, around the Barbican and of course up on the Hoe catching a sailor’s eye.
This is a very special posthumous exhibition. It runs until 29th August 2011. http://www.bristol.gov.uk/page/beryl-cook-larger-life
