Beryl Cook
Roulette, 2001
£800
A lifetime, limited edition silkscreen print, signed and numbered by the artist.
Dimensions
65.5 x 67 cm
Finishing
Screenprint on paper
Artist's Proof, signed and numbered XXV / LX (25 of 60) by the artist
Courtesy the artist's estate
About The Artwork
'Roulette' features a triumphant winner leaning all the way across the table to scoop up her winnings, much to the chagrin of those around her. A great people watcher, Beryl Cook would incorporate fleeting moments, gestures, outfits and hairstyles she had observed in her paintings. She enjoyed keeping up with the latest fashion trends and delighted in detailing how people dressed, as seen here in the matching bright red polkadot dress and shoes, and the crisp pinstripe suits worn by onlookers to the scene. Joe Whitlock Blundell worked closely with Beryl to produce all of her books, and in his introduction to 'Beryl Cook: The Bumper Edition' he recalls her process. 'Beryl fell silent - her attention had been caught by a hairstyle, a pair of shoes, an embrace, and she gazed at it, absorbing every detail. She extracted a little card from her handbag and surreptitiously sketched some aspect of the scene to help her recall it later. So many of her paintings had their genesis in this way - details accumulated from a variety of sources and later assembled into the final composition.' Joe Whitlock Blundell.
About Beryl Cook
Beryl Cook (1926–2008) was one of Britain’s best-loved artists. A self-taught painter, Cook is renowned for her exuberant style and explorations of English cultural identity and everyday life. Portrayed with defiance, her work can be understood as engaging with ideas around ‘female camp’, class and pleasure. Additionally, they can be contextualised within contemporary body positivity movements. Her larger-sized, usually jovial characters celebrate bigger bodies and inclusivity.
Cook's most celebrated and enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties. Though the women in Cook’s works embody comedic or bawdy qualities, they command the space of her paintings in complex, vivid and entirely believable portraits that draw from keenly observed social interactions.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, the Bristol City Museum of Art Gallery, and the Plymouth City Art Gallery, among others. The artist has received retrospective exhibitions at Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2007); Plymouth City Art Gallery, Plymouth (2017); and A.H.F.T.A.W, New York (2022).