Christopher Pratt

Location: Newfoundland | Profession: Artist

Click to show/hide links to other profiles

Christopher Pratt 1977

Newfoundland’s Christopher Pratt is one of Canada’s most recognised and beloved artists. His precisely rendered landscapes, seascapes and depictions of the relationship between humanity and its environment appear in galleries around the world. A recent retrospective of Mr. Pratt’s work appeared at the National Gallery in Ottawa in 2005. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Chrisopher Pratt 2005

What They Said

After a year and a half of doing the general arts course at Mount Allison, I quit school cold turkey. It was the fall of 1955. My future wife, Mary, and I had been put in charge of decorations for the Junior Prom. I had worked on the decorations all fall, designing murals for the gymnasium. I enjoyed that so much that I hadn’t really gone to class. I was in no shape to write Christmas exams, so I quit, came back to Newfoundland and set up a studio in my bedroom in St. John’s. I had won some prizes for my watercolours in the meantime, and I just started to paint full-time. I found I could sell watercolours for about $35 a pop, which kept me in pocket money and out of my Dad’s pocket.

My father suggested that, if I was going to do this for a career, I should probably go to art school. So I planned out a trip to check out what there was to offer. I started by flying to New York City to check out what we called the Art School’s League. The students were all on a break at the time, so there was no one to talk to. I wandered around New York as if it wasn’t dangerous. I went to Abercrombie and Fitch to see what kind of fishing tackle they had there. Then I went to the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. I sought out things for which I had reference already. I wanted to see a Winslow Homer in the flesh, for example, and Picasso and Paul Clay. What impressed me the most was that this stuff was real. This wasn’t “entertainment”, this wasn’t some frill, something that wasn’t essential to humanity, something that rich dilettantes did to while away hours or crazy bohemians did because they didn’t want to do real work. I recognized that this was a very important, authentic, meaningful line of work.  That’s the way I would put it – a very legitimate thing for a person to do and be pre-occupied with.

After that, I took the train up to Toronto and visited the Ontario College of Art and what were the beginnings of the Art Gallery of Ontario.When it was all done, and after I’d gone to Mount Allison to see Mary, I returned home and took up my brushes again. Soon after, Mary was back, we got married and I took a job surveying runways and laying out buildings for a construction company that worked on behalf of the Argentia American Navy base. I tell people it was the only job I ever had, because I got a weekly wage. While working there, I lived in a small cabin my family and I had built nearby. My father helped with the cost of the cabin. I was there by myself most of the time and there was no electricity, but it was incredibly important for my early development as a painter.