Alice Brock. RIP To A Legend

Feb. 28, 1941 - Nov. 21, 2024

In the late 1960s, when I was in my teens, I met Alice Brock while vacationing with my parents in St. Maarten and had the pleasure of hanging out with her over the next couple days. She told me she had a daughter named Rebecca. Years later, in 2009, I reconnected with her and in 2012 interviewed her for Alimentum, a gorgeous but now-defunct print and online food journal. (The domain name is now owned by another entity.) Alice wrote me when the article came out and we corresponded again in 2014. After that, we lost touch. I’m so deeply saddened to learn of her passing.

I’m sharing the Alimentum article, because I think it tells a bit more of her story than just a woman who was a character in an Arlo Guthrie song. (The article included a number of her images, but I hesitate to include them without explicit permission. Please do visit her website to view her work.)

The song and the movie that came after did make her famous, but offered only a sliver of insight into a woman who was kind and funny and brave and wildly, delightfully, generously creative.

Blast from the Past: Alice Brock is Still Cookin’

Alimentum, 2012

Alice Brock is better known to many as the “Alice” in Arlo Guthrie’s iconic sixties hit song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” But few know of how the former restaurateur has interwoven her love of food and cooking with her lifelong passion for art.

“My father was in the silk-screen business and he gave me a silk-screen set up,” Alice says, sharing that she learned early on to play with color, using a squeegee to create backgrounds with poured paint.

She paid more attention to the art around her home than most children probably would have. “I started drawing before I even knew language.” Alice is quiet for a moment, then adds, “It is my language.”

Alice, who confesses she has no formal art training, describes influences on her work: “Picasso, Thurber. The Impressionists,” she says, listing them with a certain breeziness, as if they are old pals. She especially enjoys creating line drawings, describing herself as a “serial painter,” who likes to explore the myriad possibilities of a theme. “Once is never enough. I think, ‘What about this or that?’ It’s probably from smoking too much marijuana,” she says with a laugh. 

Alice begins with a vague idea. “Okay. Forks and spaghetti. Then I say, ‘Eh. I’ll try it.’ I give everything a personality – an eggplant or a carrot. I do lots of sketches. You’d be surprised how much preparation goes into it. A lot of the drawings are better than the paintings because they’re more spontaneous. I just go with the shapes, the emotions and personalities in the shapes.”

Her beach stones, begun on a whim,  are wildly popular. “I can barely keep up with the demand,” she admits. Alice started doing the beach stones in her early twenties, painting them and then throwing them back in the water. “People said I shouldn’t do that,” she says, “so I started throwing them above the tide line. I never wanted to sell them. I thought they should be ‘found’. But a gallery owner I knew wanted them so badly, so I agreed to let him sell them. I told him not to charge too much, but he sold them for more then than I do now!” Alice decided she should be the one to sell her stones and also to start framing her paintings, so she took her budding art career into her own hands.

Alice’s numerous fans are on a sort of counterculture mission with the stones, placing them, often surreptitiously, in places such as the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art. One person sent her a picture of himself throwing a beach stone over the Great Wall of China. Another, a middle-aged woman, spoke with Alice as she was preparing to sail around the world solo in a thirty-foot sailboat. When Alice heard of her planned journey, she advised, “Well, you’d better take some of these and spread them around,” giving the woman several of the beach stones. The woman sent back a picture of one she left on a remote island in the South Seas. “There was a grass hut where fishermen would stop over, and she put one of the stones at the entrance to the hut.” 

Alice describes early challenges as a young artist. “The teacher would come and draw right on my drawings!” She still sounds shocked at the thought. “I don’t like people telling me what to do, and that was not okay! Boy!”

Speaking of the necessary freedom involved in the creative process, she says, “What you get to make up, to discover – that’s fun! The act of painting – it’s like a religious experience. You feel like someone else is moving your hand, forces moving through you. You’re a conduit. It’s a blessing — I think most artists would say, it’s just kind of magical.”

Alice, while still enamored of food, doesn’t cook much anymore, the emphysema that plagues her slowing her down. When she does cook, it’s an all-day affair. “I’ll do a tomato sauce or a lamb stew or bean soup.” She also confesses to being a meat-eater, which habit she tempers with “lots of kale, collards, Swiss chard, and spinach.”

What new art is on the horizon for Alice? “I have a lot of drawings I want to turn into paintings. Things that go on in the kitchen, such as plates crawling up the wall and forks flying out a window.”  One wonders just exactly what goes on in Alice Brock’s kitchen.

Alice has written several books, How to Massage Your Cat and two out of print works, My Life as a Restaurant, and Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook. (She and Arlo Guthrie also collaborated on a children’s book, Mooses Come Walking, with Guthrie writing the story and Ms. Brock creating the illustrations.)

On her decision to move to Provincetown those many years ago, Alice says, “Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to live here and paint pictures. Other people have plans and programs. They have a five-year plan. Maybe that works for them. I just leap before I look.”

Alice offers this advice on the adventure of life: “Do what you love, then everything is easy and all seems to fall into place. Go for it! Just take the chance. You know, I’m coming to find life is a lot shorter than we think it is.”

RIP to a true legend.

(More information at https://www.alicebrockstudio.com.)