Artist Beryl Cook produces her jolly masterpieces of bulky rotund women and slightly sinister men in a small room full of visual clamour in a protected Georgian terraced house just off The Hoe in Plymouth. She and her husband, John, bought it as a guesthouse about 15 years ago and this room, first-floor front, was their bedroom until the noise at turning out time in the nearby pubs, on Fridays and Saturdays prompted them to move to the back. So she bagged this room, one of three they used to let in the early days, as her studio and it still has a guest room washbasin in it. Most days she comes up here at about 8.30 in the morning and stays until six, apart from a brief break when John, who works in the motor trade, comes home for lunch.

The modest jumbled room expresses an alter ego that is not immediately obvious in the rest of the immaculately neat house, though a certain quirkiness of taste gradually impinges - like the large collection of Bonzo artefacts in the bedroom next door (Bonzo was an early comic strip dog to whose memory she is devoted) or the curiously Gandhi-like figure usually kept on her sitting room windowsill and brought up here when he came under discussion. He is in fact a model made out of rubber and his function is to advertise men's 'posture belts' as they call corsets in New York, where she bought him.

Beryl Cook, a warm exuberant woman with a contagious laugh, has a natural artist's eye for shape, form, oddity. She is shy but not reserved and has still not come to terms with the attention her work has brought her, though she makes her own comment in the self-portrait propped against the half-netted window. The mouth juts out to accommodate a small record. 'I made that once when 1 was so tired of giving interviews.'

The plunge into work can be delayed occasionally when she goes shopping, sneaking an hour or two to ferret around market stalls and antique, charity or junk shops where some of the room's contents came from, including the office swivel chair on which she sits, bought for £1. The easel was found in an antique shop and belonged at one time to Mabel Lucie Attwell, the illustrator, whose bonneted little girls are in such notable contrast with Beryl Cook's rumbustious females - that superb pink-jacketed rider, for instance, powerfully reining in her horse. 'I painted that horse from cuttings shall 1 show you?' she asked, reaching for a handful of limp newspaper photographs of Prince Charles's polo pony. 'She is a Master of Foxhounds hunting lady - 1 saw her somewhere, but she doesn't know she was my model.' The man in the painting on the wall behind her was another unwitting model. 'We used to know him, he didn't wear clothes like that but he was awfully fond of leather jackets.'

She always carries a set of cards with her, easily concealed in her handbag, so that she can make notes of what she sees, observing acutely the bawdy-edged street theatre of a seaport. 'That picture there' - she pointed to an inebriated-looking group, - 'we often saw them in a pub, and we were in there one day and this man, he was as rough as rats actually, was kissing them all in turn, so 1 ran home and painted them.' The picture on the easel of some substantial looking nudes in hats is her version of a country tea party. 'We have a field down in a place called Botus fleming and it prompted me to do a country picture but the country isn't enough 'for me, so 1 thought I'd better have a few people in it to make it more exciting and so the countryside got less and less and the people bigger and bigger.'

She had been interested in art long before she started to paint. Beryl Cook was born in Reading and she and John and their young son spent eight years in Rhodesia before returning to live in Looe, Cornwall. She began to paint in Looe to counter boredom - 'and that was it, it just grew, it's like taking drugs.' She is self-taught. 'When 1 started, 1 didn't know how to do anything. If 1 wanted to find out how to draw something, 1 turned to cartoons because they say things in a very economical way.' .

She is surrounded by her props: a window-dresser friend gave her the head on which Beryl used to keep a man's bowler hat that figured frequently in her pictures. 'I always leave some sort of a hat on her because she's got a hole in the head. 1 also -painted her up a bit, she was rather shabby.' The shop dummy is useful for when she's drawing a coat or a suit. The shirt amused her, so she keeps it on the dummy all the time now. On the tray at her side is her collection of wind-up toys - 'there's no fag with batteries and they're great fun to watch'. She collects wristwatches, some of which are kept on a shop display hand. One plays several tunes, including 'JingleBells' and 'Happy Birthday' - 'but it takes me three hours to set it and even then 1 may not get it right'.

She also likes eggs and some years ago presented her husband with the large ostrich egg on the mantelpiece for Christmas. 'He was absolutely amazed when he opened the box. 1 don't think he ever liked it quite as much as I did.' The plaques along the top of the overmantel were made by her son, and painted by her elder granddaughter, who is 16. She has another granddaughter, aged two and they all live next door.

Animals 6gure prominently in the Cook household and Beryl bought the imitation leopard-skin in a charity shop especially for Lottie, the wire haired dachshund, Minnie the Jack Russell terrier (the nearest Beryl could get to a Bonzo-type dog) and cats Fifi and Ruby to lie on. On one wall, there are photographs of her adoptees at London Zoo - a lappetfaced vulture called, at her insistence Beryl, and the long-nosed poteroo, an Australian rat. 'I'd have liked a wart hog. I'm very fond of them.'

Beryl Cook has created a genre as immediately recognisable as Lowry's matchstick people or Donald McGilI's saucy postcard characters, yet she is modest about her achievement. She insists she leads a very mundane life and on this account refuses invitations to pontificate on the wireless, though she has made one or two television films about her work. Beryl Cook's fat and frolicsome people follow no party line, preach no philosophy, punch home no message other than the oblique unstated one that their creator has found through them her own pathway to a happy and fulfilled life. 'There is no reason for me painting, I have nothing I want to say, I just love painting and I don't want to be denied the chance of doing it.'

much as I did.' The plaques along the top of the overmantel were made by her son, and painted by her elder granddaughter, who is 16. She has another granddaughter, aged two and they all live next door.

Animals 6gure prominently in the Cook household and Beryl bought the imitation leopard-skin in a charity shop especially for Lottie, the wire

haired dachshund, Minnie the Jack Russell terrier (the nearest Beryl could get to a Bonzo-type dog) and cats Fifi and Ruby to lie on. On one wall, there are photographs of her adoptees at London Zoo - a lappetfaced vulture called, at her insistence, Beryl, and the long-nosed poteroo, an Australian rat. 'I'd have liked a wart . hog. I'm very fond of them.'

Beryl Cook has created a genre as immediately recognisable as Lowry's matchstick people or Donald McGilI's saucy postcard characters, yet she is modest about her achievement. She insists she leads a very mundane life and on this account refuses invitations to pontificate on the wireless, though she has made one or two television films about her work. Beryl Cook's fat

and frolicsome people follow no party line, preach no philosophy, punch home no message other than the oblique unstated one that their creator has found through them her own pathway to a happy and fulfilled life. 'There is no reason for me painting, I have nothing I want to say, I just love painting and I don't want to be denied the chance of doing it.'