Christopher Pratt: Personal Reflections on a Life in Art

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Christopher Pratt is a solemnly beautiful book, and a very personal one.
The text is Pratt’s, as are the images—more than 200 color plates
and black-and-white reproductions of his paintings, screenprints,
drawings, sketches, and studies. The artist’s own words, often short
passages taken from his diaries, set beside a work, serve as commentary
and background.

Pratt was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1935, and now lives on
the bank of the Salmonier River, St. Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland. His
work is cooler, less overtly involved with his native province than that
of fellow Newfoundlander Gerald Squires, yet the water and the boats,
the skies and clapboard houses and people of the island are here too;
his feeling for technology is reminiscent of Alex Colville’s art.
Pratt is, or was, fascinated by the human figure, and the book includes
some fine nude studies dating from the late 1960s.

In his introduction, David Silcox calls Pratt “one of Canada’s most
universal painters.” His symbols, Silcox notes, are as chiseled and
plain as Shaker furniture “and yet simultaneously mysterious and
enigmatic.” They are crisp and straightforward, yet “still
oblique.” Something surprising is always just about to happen.

Pratt’s studio, which he designed and built in 1989–90, burned down
early in 1992; some paintings, some music, and many books were lost.
Pratt denies that recent images are “deliberately stripped of hope,”
but admits that he can find “very little to put into them.” Recent
paintings such as Freight Shed, Boathouse, and A Room at St. Vincent’s
are bleak, lacking in human feeling or signs of life. These technically
perfect works speak of loneliness and silence. Those who wish to
understand Pratt’s art may find the brief text as significant as the
images.