Beryl Cook

Canonical iconography from one very naughty lady.

Twins

As a child in the 90s Beryl Cook’s pneumatic housewives were as familiar to me as the cast of Father Ted, Mr Blobby, or the panda on a bottle of bubblegum pop. On wall calendars, birthday cards and stamps, in coffee table books and occasionally framed and on display in a café, these ladies were everywhere; strutting, stripping, laughing.

Myself I was always most comfortable in the company of women, and luckily I was, for the most part, allowed to live in their world until well into my teens. As an effeminate little boy I was there with them, with my mother, my aunts, their friends, but simultaneously at a distance from them. I remember both an indulgence and a pity, they found me entertaining and my attentions flattering, but they also couldn’t help but reveal how sorry they felt for me, were I to turn out as they feared. I learned a great deal from them, about men and sex, about navigating social bureaucracy, about keeping secrets for a rainy day. I stored it all away, the underclass glamour, the mannerisms, the politics and wry humour worked deep into the cult of anecdotes, it all became foundational.

I feel a kind of kinship with Beryl Cook in a strange way, when I think of who she was and who she painted. A shy little lady with specs and a sensible grey crop, immortalising gargantuan good time girls in leopard print miniskirts; I wonder if she wasn’t in a way painting for her own sake, a different sense of self. A world in which she was a va-va-voom dame herself dancing with a sailor, rather than the slender figure sitting sipping a G&T in the corner and sketching on the cards she kept in her handbag. Apparently she was so timid that she declined to go to Buck House to receive her OBE, choosing to pick it up at a smaller ceremony in Plymouth. Yet even her most modest paintings bulge at the seams with pure exhibitionism. Just look. A lady driver walks to her car in a Marinière and patent leather pumps with a sassy terrier under her arm seemingly rolling its eyes at the viewer. Two old ladies swan out of The Algonquin bundled in furs like Emperor penguins, another feeds her cat at midnight in full white tie and tiaras drag, another dances flamenco on her unpaid bills. Surely there’s a sense of wish fulfilment at play here of being someone else, someone bolder? And is it just me or are some of Cook’s girlies, with their broad features and dangerous curves giving secondary transsexual pin-up? Perhaps I’m over-identifying now, but all the same I can safely say that many of my finest aesthetic choices were most definitely shaped by Cook’s images.

Because they were so ubiquitous during my childhood there never was any shame or scandal attached to them, despite the fact that they’re full of ladies in peek-a-boo bras waving whips, and women naked under fur coats exposing themselves to passers-by. Not to mention the gay bars, prostitutes and drag queens Cook painted, outsiders she portrayed without any of the mockery or moral judgment that defined the era’s attitude towards queer people. In spite of Gen Z’s *much* discussed love for them, the 90s were weirdly cruel and conservative; every other week Madonna was being threatened with excommunication for simply flashing her muff and a lesbian kiss in a soap opera was enough to send the media into meltdown.

My Fur Coat