Beryl Cook¿s place deep in the heart of the British public is long-standing . Her humour, playfulness, subtlety and perceptiveness have guaranteed her position as Britain¿s most enduringly popular artist. Saucy and shy, risqué and prudish, she records details of contemporary life with irrepressible glee. Cruising is a book that illustrates both the sailing and the amorous kinds. Whether it¿s a group of large women tumbling into a tardis-sized jacuzzi on the deck of an ocean liner, or a bride-to-be lunging into the arms of an unsuspecting Tarzanogram on her hen night, Beryl Cook paints with delicious wit, inviting us in on a world having a good time.
Beryl Cook began to paint during the 1960s and became a local phenomenon in Cornwall, England where she lived with her family, but it wasn't until 1975 that she first exhibited her work. Her appeal was classless and she rapidly became Britain's most popular artist. She was a 'heart and soul' painter, compelled to paint with a passion. Her work became instantly recognisable and was soon a part of our artistic vernacular. A modern-day Hogarth, Beryl Cook was a social observer, albeit with a more sympathetic view of humanity. The warm, original style of her paintings encapsulates joy. She possessed that rare gift - the power to uplift. Now the work of Beryl Cook can be seen again, both by her loyal fans and a new generation, in this vibrant and fun product range from Kinkajou.
Beryl Cook is Britains's most popular and endearing artist. Her ability to delight the viewer has made her as popular as any of our best-loved comedians. This beautiful and lavish book features over 300 of Beryl's playful, hilarious, and perceptive color pictures.
Just because your granny is old doesn't mean she is boring! This granny is full of energy - in fact, it wasn't until her eighties that she started really having fun. She's learnt to tap-dance, has tried to fly, learnt magician's tricks, and plays regularly in a football team amongst many other things. This title is a wonderful celebration of old age and will delight and amuse readers, both old and young.
There are more than a few ways to grow old, so why not choose disgracefully? This book features original artwork from Beryl Cook, accompanied by lovely suggestions from dressing inappropriately to naked hot-tubbing. A perfect gift for those living on the lighter side of life.
Redefining curatorial practice for those working with new kinds of art. As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks are difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology and present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems. The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art's characteristics. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists' practice.
The life of pioneering photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer 'Thoroughly entertaining... Knights expertly evokes this hedonistic period' The Times 'A picturesque portrayal of a world that sounds as thoroughly maniacal as it was modern' Daily Telegraph 'I just called myself Ker-Seymer Photographs,' Barbara said. 'I didn't think it was necessary to have your sex displayed on the photographs.' Vivacious, sassy, out to have fun, Ker-Seymer was committed to independence. One of a handful of outstanding British photographers of her generation, Ker-Seymer's work defined a talented, forward-looking network of artists, dancers, writers, actors and musicians, all of whom flocked to her Bond Street studio. Among her sitters were Evelyn Waugh, Margot Fonteyn, Cyril Connolly, Jean Cocteau and Vita Sackville-West. Barbara Ker-Seymer (1905-1993) disdained lucrative 'society' portraits in favour of unfussy 'modern' images. Her work was widely admired by her peers, among them, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. Her images as a gossip-column photojournalist for Harper's Bazaar were the go-to representations of the aristocracy and Bright Young Things at play. Yet as both a studio portraitist and a photojournalist, she broke with convention. Equally unconventional in her personal life, Ker-Seymer was prefigurative in the way she lived her life as a bisexual woman and in her contempt for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Fiercely independent, for much of her life she rejected the idea of family, preferring her wide set of creative friends, with the artist Edward Burra, ballet dancer William 'Billy' Chappell and choreographer Frederick Ashton at its core. Today, Ker-Seymer's photographs are known for whom they represent, rather than the face behind the camera, an irony underpinned by the misattribution of some of her most daring images to Cecil Beaton. Yet her intelligence, sparkle, wit and genius enabled her to link arms with the surrealists, the Bloomsbury Group, the Bright Young Things and, most gloriously, the worlds of theatre, cabaret and jazz. With unprecedented access to private archives and hitherto unseen material, Sarah Knights brings Barbara Ker-Seymer and her brilliant bohemian friends vividly to life.
Who made modern Britain? This book, drawn from the award-winning Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, tells the story of our recent past through the lives of those who shaped national life. Following on from the Oxford DNB's first supplement volume-noteworthy people who died between 2001 and 2004-this new volume offers biographies of more than 850 men and women who left their mark on twentieth and twenty-first century Britain, and who died in the years 2005 to 2008. Here are the people responsible for major developments in national life: from politics, the arts, business, technology, and law to military service, sport, education, science, and medicine. Many are closely connected to specific periods in Britain's recent history. From the 1950s, the young Harold Pinter or the Yorkshire cricketer, Fred Trueman, for example. From the Sixties, the footballer George Best, photographer Patrick Lichfield, and the Pink Floyd musician, Syd Barrett. It's hard to look back to the 1970s without thinking of Edward Heath and James Callaghan, who led the country for seven years in that turbulent decade; or similarly Freddie Laker, pioneer of budget air travel, and the comedians Ronnie Barker and Dave Allen who entertained with their sketch shows and sit coms. A decade later you probably browsed in Anita Roddick's Body Shop, or danced to the music of Factory Records, established by the Manchester entrepreneur, Tony Wilson. In the 1990s you may have hoped that 'Things can only get better' with a New Labour government which included Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam. Many in this volume are remembered for lives dedicated to a profession or cause: Bill Deedes or Conor Cruise O'Brien in journalism; Ned Sherrin in broadcasting or, indeed, Ted Heath whose political career spanned more than 50 years. Others were responsible for discoveries or innovations of lasting legacy and benefit-among them the epidemiologist Richard Doll, who made the link between smoking and lung cancer, Cicely Saunders, creator of the hospice movement, and Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans. With John Profumo-who gave his name to a scandal-policeman Malcolm Fewtrell-who investigated the Great Train Robbery-or the Russian dissident Aleksandr Litvinenko-who was killed in London in 2006-we have individuals best known for specific moments in our recent past. Others are synonymous with popular objects and experiences evocative of recent decades: Mastermind with Magnus Magnusson, the PG-Tips chimpanzees trained by Molly Badham, John DeLorean's 'gull-wing' car, or the new British Library designed by Colin St John Wilson-though, as rounded and balanced accounts, Oxford DNB biographies also set these events in the wider context of a person's life story. Authoritative and accessible, the biographies in this volume are written by specialist authors, many of them leading figures in their field. Here you will find Michael Billington on Harold Pinter, Michael Crick on George Best, Richard Davenport-Hines on Anita Roddick, Brenda Hale on Rose Heilbron, Roy Hattersley on James Callaghan, Simon Heffer on John Profumo, Douglas Hurd on Edward Heath, Alex Jennings on Paul Scofield, Hermione Lee on Pat Kavanagh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Conor Cruise O'Brien, and Peregrine Worsthorne on Bill Deedes. Many in this volume are, naturally, household names. But a good number are also remembered for lives away from the headlines. What in the 1980s became 'Thatcherism' owed much to behind the scenes advice from Ralph Harris and Alfred Sherman; children who learned to read with Ladybird Books must thank their creator, Douglas Keen; while, without its first producer, Verity Lambert, there would have been no Doctor Who. Others are 'ordinary' people capable of remarkable acts. Take, for instance, Arthur Bywater who over two days in 1944 cleared thousands of bombs from a Liverpool munitions factory following an explosion-only to do the same, months later, in an another factory. Awarded the George Cross and the George Medal, Bywater remains the only non-combatant to have received Britain's two highest awards for civilian bravery.
