Artist Beryl Cook is 80 and still going strong

Popular UK artist Beryl Cook is celebrating her 80th birthday with a brand new exhibition of her work online at http://www.photogold.co.uk . Cook is one of Britain's most talented and amusing artists .Beryl's pictures feature women of all shapes and sizes enjoying themselves .Beryl Cook left Kendrick School in Reading at the age of 15 . She eventually married her next door neighbour from Reading, John Cook.
Beryl bought their young son a box of watercolours, and when showing him how to use it, she decided that she herself quite enjoyed painting. John subsequently bought her a child's painting set for her birthday and it was with this that she produced her first significant work, a half-length portrait of a dark-skinned lady with a vacant expression and large drooping breasts. It was aptly named 'Hangover' by Beryl's husband and still hangs in their house today.

In 1964 Beryl Cook and her husband returned to the UK . Beryl ran a boarding house for holidaymakers on the seafront. Her paintings came to the attention of Bernard Samuels at the Plymouth Arts Centre who persuaded her to mount her first exhibition featuring 75 paintings. It was a sell out. The rest, as they say, is history.

Exhibitions at the Whitechapel and Portal Galleries in London followed . Her first book 'The Works' was published in 1978. Her paintings were then reproduced as greeting cards and limited edition prints and soon her work was being featured around the world, tickling ribs from Kingston to the Cape, and generating considerable popular acclaim.

Like fellow artist Jack Vettriano, Cook's success has been mirrored by criticism from the art establishment . Brian Sewell of the lodon Evening Standard has dismissed her work , claiming she had " developed a successful formula which a lot of fools are prepared to buy , but which is anti-art in my view . It doesn't have the intellectual honesty of a pub sigbn for the Pig and Whistle . It is unworthy of any art gallery"

One of her paintings is featured in the fifth Peter Moores exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The new Glasgow Museum of Modern Art has also recently purchased some of her original work, ensuring her a place in the annuls of British Art. Beryl Cook continues to paint and has recently moved from Plymouth to Bristol, to be near her family