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The artist Jean Cooke (1927-2008) was not your typical gardener. Fairly than cultivating nature, she let it unfastened. She had two gardens: a riotous metropolis plot in London and a rambling cliff-top meadow in Sussex. “I believe she was fairly a wild individual in a means,” says Andrew Lambirth, the curator of a brand new exhibition on the Backyard Museum in south London, which can carry collectively Cooke’s mesmerising backyard work and portraits. “Not in her behaviour, however she didn’t need to be managed.”
In 1953 she married John Bratby, who turned famend for his realist work of cluttered kitchen tabletops. It was an abusive marriage, with Bratby permitting Cooke to color for less than three hours a day, and slashing her canvases. Whereas nicely revered amongst fellow artists, she was little recognized to the general public. Bratby painted her commonly, and the outcomes have been unflattering and brusque, which prompted her to reclaim her id through candid self-portraits painted with a larger diploma of interiority. “Her [self-portraits] aren’t flattering both,” Lambirth says, “however she seems at herself quizzically, recording what she regarded like and in addition how she felt.”
Jean Cooke: Ungardening—a reference to how she as soon as described her passion in Who’s Who reference e-book—will embody a number of self-portraits, one with a black eye, one other cramped in an oval mirror with a fistful of brushes. Alongside them might be wealthy and nuanced research of buttercups and irises, in addition to lyrical work of her gardens.
The 1967 portray Hortus Siccus exhibits a number of variations of her son Jason amid a tangle of dried vegetation and flowers; Toujours en Fête (1969) depicts the artist and her three sons in a blooming meadow.
On view for the primary time in nearly 50 years, such large-scale compositions seize Cooke’s technical prowess and psychological perception even early on in her profession. They provide a recent and expressive view of nature and figures at one with foliage. “They’re additionally, I believe, work of a survivor,” Lambirth says. Cooke survived Bratby, and continued to color after they separated in 1972. “She is an actual energy to be reckoned with,” Lambirth provides.
• Jean Cooke: Ungardening, Backyard Museum, London, 21 June-10 September
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