The brilliance of Beryl Cook

Nobody claims Beryl Cook was an artistic genius, least of all the artist herself. ‘I think my work lies somewhere between Donald McGill [the saucy postcard artist that George Orwell wrote so lyrically about] and Stanley Spencer,’ she once told me. ‘But I’m sorry to say I’m probably nearer McGill.’

She was, as ever, being modest. I actually think she’s nearer Spencer – and Hogarth, come to that. Cook’s paintings make us laugh but that doesn’t stop them from being art. (Few would say Shakespeare’s comedies are as profound as his tragedies, but they’re brilliant creations, nevertheless.) Though Victoria Wood dubbed her work ‘Rubens with jokes’, there aren’t actually any jokes in her pictures; they’re all direct observations, not double entendres.

I once asked Beryl if she’d ever wanted to paint something serious. She said: ‘I see things that horrify me, but I don’t want to paint them. If I thought that by painting something very meaningful it would change things, then perhaps I might… but I don’t believe that. So, I don’t. I think people are getting dulled by the amount of horror. I only paint when I’m excited by something, and what excites me is the joy in life.’

Her art sprung from nowhere. She’d given her son some paints for his birthday, and he painted a picture with grass at the bottom, a little house standing on it and a band of blue sky at the top. ‘But there’s nothing in the middle,’ Beryl complained. ‘There isn’t anything in the middle,’ he replied. ‘I’ll show you what’s in the middle,’ said Beryl, grabbing hold of a brush and another sheet of paper. She painted two great bare breasts and then added on top a head with eyes looking sharply to one side, as if to say, ‘What do you think you’re staring at?’ She had no idea how to paint a waist so painted a fence along the bottom with the breasts lolling over.