Cooke continued to paint on the beach until the end of her life. In 1979, she had said: ‘Each winter I hibernate and then with the first sun, like an old tortoise, I amble out with bleary eyes and start to see again…’. We can picture her on the shingle beach – carrying the burden of years but enriched by a life full of incident and passion for the making of art, independent and infinitely spirited. A series of square format linen canvases painted at the end of her life are testament to her ongoing intoxication with the shoreline, each day a revelation. They are distinct in the spareness of their means and subject matter. Sometime in the 1980s she wrote that ‘I am beginning to realise the full force of colour in space.’ Works such as Small Seascape, Each Grain of Sand and View from the Cliff Edge movingly represent a dissolve into something beyond herself. The pebbles, the furl of the sea, and the scudding clouds loosely rendered, are as much an embrace of the unseen as they are about the scene in front of her. Painting, she said, ‘becomes more and more beautiful the more simplified it is. It’s rather like a spiritual high.’