Raspberries Reflecting Summer. Shimmering! |
Green Grapes, Wedding Presents & Half a Cantaloupe |
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 |
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 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 "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 |
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