Mary Pratt, 1938-2018, Canadian artist: Illuminating Everyday Life

Mary Pratt, Canadian, Jelly Shelf, 1990s
"I think, with my work, even the things that are ordinary are not ordinary, because I don’t believe that anything is ordinary. I think everything is complex and worthy of conjecture, and worthy of a look — worthy of a close look."

Doesn't the painting above, of jars of jelly, look like an Alice Fish painting? I thought so too when I first saw it and seized upon it.  It felt good to recognize a piece of art by its style, composition, subject, color. But I was wrong. It's not an Alice Fish. It's a Mary Pratt. Off to google I went.

Raspberries Reflecting Summer. Shimmering!

Their are several interesting Mary Pratts, I discovered. There's a Mary Pratt baseball player from Ohio, a real pioneer. Fascinating story. And a Mary Pratt contemporary artist, based in Atlanta, Georgia, whose paintings are fabulous. I got distracted for a good while, which is how I spend a lot of time.

The Mary Pratt whom I thought was Alice Fish is a Canadian artist, born in 1935. Same year as Alice Fish, same generation. Was that a particular way that some talented women of that time saw life and added meaning to their everyday experiences? Is that how some women painters who came of age during the post-World War II generation added value to the ordinary domestic life to which they were socially assigned?  Interpreters of the Feminine Mystique from women artists' points of view?

Green Grapes, Wedding Presents &
Half a Cantaloupe

Mary West married artist Christopher Pratt in 1957 and had four children. While he painted and became a well-known artist in Canada, Mary's life was filled with domestic chores. She lived in rural St. Johns, Newfoundland, took care of her children and her husband. It was hard to find time to paint.

Still, when some item or other moved her, she felt an "erotic charge," as she put it, that propelled her to pick up her brush. She had taken art lessons as a young girl, studied Fine Art in College, took lots of photos which she later returned to and found images that impelled her to paint them. That's how she found her voice, her medium, her own signature style. She put her painting career this way: “It was a love affair with vision. A real love affair with vision.”   

I don't know whether or not Fish and Pratt knew each other, or knew of each other's work, but they shared a vision. Look at those jars of jelly. Uncanny, the way a golden light runs through them like light runs through Alice Fish's glassware and red cups, jars of salad dressing and cellophane covered peaches. Both infused everyday objects with prisms of light and color. Both transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Pratt like Alice Fish loved red, too.   

"There’s a painting of raspberries that I did, where there were all kinds of little glass blobs, and every blob is different than every other glass blob, and every one of them has to be given its full due. You can’t just say, “Oh well, yes, there’s glass: light on one side and red on the other; now that’ll be enough,” because that’s not the way it is. It’s very intricate. And I just love these intricacies, because they all lend to the truth of the object, or the truth of the vision, and I just think they’re worth doing."

Pitcher with Lemons

Mary Pratt created personal, translucent realistic still lifes. If, as critics said of  Alice Fish "she transformed the still life," well so did Pratt. Both took objects from domestic life and added meaning to them, illuminated them. 

I was fascinated that Pratt painted mostly from things around her at home or from photographs. She preferred being inside rather than outside. After a divorce, as her children grew, many of her paintings became both more translucent and more opaque, with shades of moodiness, some sadness in the darker tones. She also felt a sense of freedom in being alone, relished it. And her art flourished. 

Silver Fish on Foil

Mary Pratt, Red Currant Jelly

"There is a colour between blue and red that is a sort of a “bridger”—allowing the heat of red to melt into the cool of blue. I love it. It has no name."

Her husband Christopher joked with her about that "bridger" color. "Mary, it's called purple!"  But not to Mary Pratt. It went beyond purple. We can see that in these paintings, above, and the way the colors fuse together and rise from that shimmering aluminum foil.  

 

Her biographer and art critic Mireille Eagan, curator of contemporary art at The Rooms Provincial Gallery in St. Johns, gives us a good look at Pratt's life. She was well known and loved in Canada, her art exhibited in galleries and museums across the country, her art celebrated. She painted until her death in August 2018.

Here we have another fabulous woman artist whose works could be in the permanent collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, and museums around the world, and hung prominently among the male artists of the traditional Western canon. 

"It may be that future texts will position Mary as a footnote, placed alongside artists whose works are perceived to have more gravity. This would underestimate her impact. Good art transforms the walk home from the gallery; it fundamentally changes how one sees the world. Mary’s art did just that. She drew our attention to the margins, to the enveloping space that exists between and around official texts. She showed us the sadness and beauty in the meals we make, the light through glass at a certain time of day, the blood of a fish on tinfoil, the washing of a baby. She showed us how to hold, to cherish, a moment before we must inevitably turn to resume the day." Mireille Eagan, Canadian Art, August 15, 2018.

If Pratt's work were marginalized, as Eagan feared, it would more than "underestimate her impact." It would underestimate the works of thousands of women whose talent has been hidden from public view. Women's art documents women's lives, their perspectives, their experiences. Sure, often you can't tell by looking at a painting if it were done by a man or a woman. Impressionists paintings or Abstract Expressionists, for example. But the talent is there, the skill, the palate and brush strokes, the glories of creation beautifully rendered. How tragic to lose the art, to lose the stories painted by women from across geography and time. In showing us her world, Pratt, like women artists everywhere, illuminates our lives and enriches us all. 

Some Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pratt_(painter)

https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/exhibitions/mary-pratt-a-love-affair-with-vision

https://canadianart.ca/features/mary-pratt-1935-2018/  Mireille Eagan on her life and work. 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/864751373634163/? for fabulous  postings of women artists whose art deserves broader public recognition. See also Christa Zaat and Carek Ronk's  https://www.facebook.com/female.artists.in.history/,  pioneers in discovering and posting women artists overtime online. Christa Zaat has put these artists in fabulous albums for art lovers, researchers and scholars, for curators, galleries and museums.  On of my biggest arguments is that museums all over the world need to buy and add women artists to their permanent collections. Sure it's nice to have a special exhibit now and them, but at least 50% of a Museum's walls should display  the art of women in all ages, all genres. 

https://globalnews.ca/news/4388778/mary-pratt-dead/ Obituary

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2018/08/26/canadian-artist-mary-pratt-remembered-by-friends-family-and-fans.html

"Pratt’s unmatched talent for depicting the mysterious beauty in the detail of everyday things — her hyper-real paintings of jelly jars on the window sill, a bloody fish in the sink, salmon on crinkled tinfoil — captured the hearts and minds of art lovers across the country and around the world." The Toronto Star, August 2018