4 Comments

1. RAB says:
   June 1, 2008 at 12:47 am

   Well if it wasn’t for the hassle of travelling to and staying in, London,
   I’d go. I like her stuff.

   The critics hate her though…

   Shallow, cliched pretentious etc etc. Yeah well fuck em!
   I dont need their sanction to like something.

   Beryl Cook died this week.
   Another artist that the critics loathed.
   For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work
   She was a Plymouth Boarding House Landlady who took up painting in her fifties.

   Her paintings are mainly of fat birds having a bloody good time, be it at the bowling green or the pub on a Hen night.

   Quintessantly British, big bright and crudely executed, almost Mc Gill cartoonish, but beautiful in their joyous celebration of ordinary life.

   She lived in Bristol for a while and I used to talk to her in the pub now and again.
   Lovely lady! Very shy except when in a pub with a drink and a fag in her hand.
   Then she was in her element!
   Thinking about it, I may well have been the Smoking Ban that killed her!
   That would have taken much of the joy out of a sweet old ladies life.
2. Alisa says:
   June 1, 2008 at 1:54 am

   I wasn’t familiar with her work, so I looked it up (ending up at the same site Cats linked to), and I have to agree with critics, RAB.
   

   For her, Picasso “embodied the novelty of destruction”.[1] She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed “dirty” colours. De Lempicka technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

   And utterly lifeless.
3. RAB says:
   June 1, 2008 at 2:47 am

   Well at least she can paint and draw
   She may have been right about the impressionists.

   No I dont take her seriously (I take very few artists or anything else seriously)
   She was a product of the 20s.
   The time of relief and frivolity and there was still such a thing as High society.
   She catalogued that time.

   Given that art, however serious is often used as mere decoration

   if I had the choice of one of her portraits and one of Lucien Freuds, then I’d take hers.

   I prefere a bit of frigid fantasy anyday
   over a picture of someone who looks like they have been dragged around behind Ben Hurs chariot for half an hour
4. Alisa says:
   June 1, 2008 at 2:58 am

   The time of relief and frivolity and there was still such a thing as High society.

   But that was my point, that there is no relief or frivolity in her work. If that is what the 20ies were like, I am glad I wasn’t there - but I hope they were not. You do have a point about Freud:-)