Beryl Cook, artist famous for painting pictures of fat ladies, was born on this date in 1926.
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| Much as I'd like to put an actual painting by Beryl Cook here, I could find nothing in the public domain. |
She was born in Egham, Surrey and christened Beryl Francis Lansley.
Her parents were Adrian S. B. Lansley and Ella Farmer-Francis, and she had three sisters.
She left school at fourteen and had a variety of jobs, including as a showgirl in a touring production of The Gypsy Princess. Another of her jobs was in the fashion industry.
She married John Cook in 1948. He was a childhood friend who was in the Merchant Navy.
The couple ran a pub in Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk for a while, then went to live in Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) for ten years.
Beryl had never been trained as an artist and hadn’t shown any interest in painting before, but one day, on impulse, she picked up some of her son’s paints and painted a picture. She found she enjoyed painting so much that she couldn’t stop and when she ran out of paper, used anything she could find: scraps of wood, fire screens and a breadboard.
When the family returned to England, Beryl carried on painting. In 1968 they bought a guest house in Plymouth and a few years later, one of their guests noticed her paintings and put her in touch with the management of the Plymouth Arts Centre, where her first exhibition took place in November 1975.
Unlike her trademark fat ladies, Beryl Cook was a very shy, private person. When she was awarded an OBE in 1995 she was too shy to attend the main ceremony but received her award at a quieter ceremony in Plymouth.
In 2004 TV company Tiger Aspect made two half hour animated films of some of Beryl Cook’s fat ladies, who meet at Plymouth’s Dolphin Pub. The series was called Bosom Pals, with Alison Steadman, Rosemary Leach, Timothy Spall and Dawn French providing the voices.
She once said, ‘I don’t know how my pictures happen, they just do. They exist, but for the life of me I can’t explain them’.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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