Monday, December 27, 2021

Artist of the Day, December 27, 2021: Christopher Pratt, a Canadian painter and printmaker (#1454)

John Christopher Pratt, CC ONL (1935) is a Canadian painter and printmaker. He first started painting watercolors in 1952. In 1953 he attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick as a student in pre-medicine. At Mount Allison he quickly became interested in Fine Arts, especially painting.

From 1957 to 1959 Pratt studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. During the summers, he returned to Newfoundland to work as a construction surveyor at the American Naval Base at Argentia. The training he received in precise measuring was applied to his paintings. In 1959 Pratt returned to Mount Allison University to complete in 1961 a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During this period he began to make silkscreen prints. The early screen print Boat in Sand, 1961 in the National Gallery's collection was produced at this time and included in the Gallery's fourth Biennial Exhibition.

In 1961, Pratt accepted the position of curator at the newly opened Memorial University Art Gallery in St. John's. He remained at the gallery for two and a half years before deciding to concentrate on his painting full-time, moving his family to Salmonier, Newfoundland.

In making prints, Pratt worked from studies to the silkscreen, using abstracted collages. His work was the subject of a major touring retrospective organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985, a touring print retrospective and catalogue raisonné, The Prints of Christopher Pratt: 1958-1991 in 1992, a major traveling exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 2005, and a ten-year retrospective of his work at The Rooms in 2015.

Pratt has served on the Canadian government's Stamp Design Advisory Committee from 1972 to 1975 and on the board of the Canada Council for the Arts from 1975 to 1981. In 1980, Pratt designed the Provincial Flag of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2005, he had a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada.

His work is found in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Rooms, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

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Christopher Pratt

Boat in Sand, 1961

 House in August, 1969

  Landing, 1973

 French Door, 1973

 New Boat, 1975

 Breakwater, 1976

 Lake Ontario, 1976

Lighthouse Door, 1978–2008

Night Trestle, 1983

  Portrait of a Young Woman, 1983

 Big Boat, 1987

 Night on the River, 1987

 Winter Moon, 1987

 My Sixty-One, 1988

 Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1989

 The Bridge, 1989

 In the Heat of Summer, 1990

 Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1994

 Driving to Venus: From Eddie's Cove East, 2000

Sunset at Squid Cove, 2004

Harbour Grace Island: The Wind Changing Against the Tide #2, 2005

 The Ruins of Fort MacAndrew (Aka Argentia Naval Station), 2006

Solstice Drive to St. Anthony, 2008

Deer Junction, 2009

Evening on the Salmonier River – Fall at My Place, 2009

 June 1949: The Way We Were, 2009

Hodges Hill, Crescent Moon and the Exploits River, 2010

A Building at Buchans, 2015

Spring: North of Bellburns, South of Anchor Point, 2016

A Farewell to Fort MacAndrew: The Last Man Standing, 2017

A Hangar at Stephanville, 2017

March at Anchor Point


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