Mary Pratt

Painting in New Brunswick and Newfoundland

Mary Pratt was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1935. She studied fine art at Mount Allison University and later made a life in Newfoundland. The places in which she lived supplied many of her subjects. Art historian Ray Cronin describes an early exhibition offered by gallery curator Peter Bell in 1967 that brought her drawings and paintings before local audiences.

Her working life developed amid domestic responsibilities. Objects on a table or materials in the kitchen were available to see, but the time and light needed to paint them could disappear. That tension became part of her practice rather than merely a circumstance surrounding it.

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Photography extends a fleeting moment

Pratt began using photographic slides to hold light effects long enough to work from them. In the case of Supper Table, her husband Christopher took the source photographs. It is useful to keep the two contributions distinct. The photograph offered a record of a moment; the choices that turned it into a painting were her own.

The method sat uneasily with the value her training had placed on direct observation. Over time it let her work more deliberately with reflections, colour and transient highlights. A camera gave her something to return to while she decided what the painting needed.

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A small painting enters a national collection

Red Currant Jelly, dated 1972, attracted sustained attention. It appeared in the National Gallery of Canada’s 1975 exhibition of Canadian women artists and entered the collection the following year, according to Cronin’s account. In 2015 the gallery used it as a point of departure for a small exhibition.

Pratt’s gallery history also includes exhibitions devoted to the breadth of her work. The 2015 focus on a single object offered a different scale of interpretation. It let curators show how a small painting could illuminate a method used over a much longer career.

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An eye for a changing surface

Pratt died in 2018. The retrospective record places still lifes alongside figure paintings and a long public career. Her work rewards attention to the way a material changes in light, from a reflective surface to something that seems lit from within. Those effects connect subjects that a catalogue might file under different genres.

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