Pearl Alcock was an artist, club owner, businesswoman, and community builder. Arriving in the UK from Jamaica in 1958 with £5 in her pocket as part of the Windrush generation, Alcock moved to Brixton to realise her dream of opening a boutique dress shop on Railton Road – an area famous for connecting with London’s LGBTQ+ community.
A loved member of her neighbourhood, below her shop, she ran a shebeen – an illegal drinking club for her friends, and popular with the local black gay community, and she later opened a café on the same street. Following the Brixton riots in the early 1980s, trade in the café ceased and Alcock was forced onto the dole. Unable to afford a birthday card for a friend, she made one instead. This simple act sparked an outpouring of creativity that lasted her entire lifetime, as she realised her ‘visions’ and ‘moods’ in the form of drawings and paintings. These abstract tangles of colour and texture caught the attention of Monika Kinley and Victor Musgrave who purchased a number of works for their collection of Outsider art.
Alcock was an exceptional colourist who worked primarily with oil paint, pencils, crayons, felt tips and acrylics. Her paintings can be categorised as narrative portraits, usually without titles; flowers and more intuitive 'Mood Pictures', which are abstract and atmospheric. Birds, like yellow canaries are often recurring in her works. Sometimes she would paint or draw Caribbean landscapes entirely from memory. She usually painted at night as she loved silence, sitting in her chair and smoking roll-up cigarettes.
Pearl Alcock (b.1934, Jamaica – d.2006, London, UK) work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, London, UK; The Whitworth, Manchester, UK; New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK, 198 Gallery, London, UK; Two Temple Place, London, UK. Her work is held in major public and private collections including The Whitworth, Manchester, UK and Collectie De Stadshof, Netherlands.
