Christopher Pratt, March 2015. (photo by Ned Pratt, courtesy National Gallery of Canada)
Christopher Pratt, one of Canada's leading painters and printmakers, died Sunday at his home in St. Mary's Bay on Newfoundland's Salmonier River. He was 86.
“Lauded from an early age as one of Canada’s finest painters and printmakers, he was faithful to his art all of his life,” Pratt's family said in a statement announcing his death.
Pratt's work, which often focused on Newfoundland's landscapes, as well as architecture, boats, interior spaces and the human figure, is in galleries across the country.
The National Gallery, which has several works by Pratt in its collection, notes that his images are largely products of his imagination.
"They are infused with memories of people, places and events that have been filtered and clarified through his search for order and simplicity," the gallery says on its website. "In this way, they are situated between reality and fiction. The paintings have a timeless and idealized quality to them.
"Pratt achieves this by concentrating on the abstract elements of design. The surfaces are flat, the compositions are frontal. The paintings are very carefully organized and precisely executed. Every thing inessential is eliminated from the subject. Through abstraction the ordinary becomes the archetypal."
Pratt himself has said his work is "essentially autobiographical."
"I’ve never really been preoccupied with the history of art or art about art and my work essentially comes from my environment but you have to take a very broad view of the term environment," he said in 2004.
"It’s not just obviously my geographical environment although that’s very important it’s also the social environment, the family environment of my childhood, memories that go back to there … and experiences that followed. It’s also the environment of things that I have read and encountered subsequently. But the bottom line really is that my work is the response to my life."
He received many honours during his long career and was appointed to both the Order of Canada and the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Pratt was born in St. John's, Nfld., and attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., where he met his future wife, Mary Pratt, who also became a well-known painter. The couple had four children – John, Anne, Barbara and Ned – and a complex marriage that ended in divorce after two decades. Christopher remarried, but was friends with Mary in later life. She died in 2018.
He had his first solo exhibition at the Memorial University Art Gallery in 1965, where he had worked as a curator from 1961 to 1963. In 1980, he was chosen to design the provincial flag. Other career highlights were his solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 2005, and a major solo show in 2015 at The Rooms in St. John's.
