Beryl Cook

From hen-parties to pub-goers, it was the larger-than-life people of Plymouth that dominated Beryl Cook's colourful paintings and won her thousands of fans across the world. The sea-front city was her beloved home for many years, and it inspired much of her best-known work. Writers and critics Jess Wilder (co-director of Portal Gallery, London), Bernard Samuels (director of Plymouth Arts Centre, 1971-1996, who discovered and was the first to exhibit Cook), Edward Lucie-Smith (international art critic), Bernadette Casey (cultural writer) and Babs Horton (novelist, prize-winning author) offer a unique perspective on the self-taught artist and a critical reassessment of her place within British Art. Illustrations of early and rarely seen work from the Cook family home in Looe, sit alongside some of her instantly recognisable paintings. This book has been produced by the University of Plymouth Press to accompany the first major retrospective of Beryl's work and has a limp case binding with overhang, end papers, sewn section, head and tail bands, 246 x 189 mm full colour match with originals exhibited at the University Peninsula Art Gallery.