IT IS APPROPRIATE THAT THIS book on Mary Pratt appears in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Most viewers are attracted by the meticulous surfaces of Pratt's images, and many will want to know more about these paintings and their creator.
Mary Pratt's paintings have fascinated and given pleasure to an increasingly large and diverse audience over the past 25 years. Like the art it discusses, the book is accessible in style and content, yet Tom Smart shows an admirable sensitivity to the complexities of his topic.
The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light develops chronologically and combines a considerable amount of biographical information with finely tuned descriptions of Pratt's works, many of which are illustrated. Smart moves easily but not too hastily through Pratt's childhood in Fredericton, her student life at Mount Allison, her marriage to Christopher Pratt, and their near isolation in Salmonier, Newfoundland. Her development as an artist is stressed in these chapters, even though it wasn't until the 1970s that Mary Pratt's version of "New Realism" gained public recognition. The final chapters focus on the changing nature of her art as she became increasingly successful.
Though he narrates the book in a straightforward way, Smart does not gloss over the struggles Pratt has had personally and professionally. She often felt guilty for using photographs as the basis for her work, even though the discovery of this technique was fundamental to her artistic identity. Christopher Pratt's relation to the female nude -and particularly with the model Donna, portrayed frequently by both artists -- was both puzzling and anguishing. Mary Pratt's increasing willingness to make what many interpreted as feminist statements in her work was for her mixed with ambivalence about any affiliation with special interest groups and political causes.
Smart does not confine Pratt or her work to any "convenient encapsulation," such as Robert Fulford's pithy but reductive image of her as "the visual poet of the kitchen." Smart sees the extraordinary range and mystery in what Pratt does and aptly draws a parallel with the writing of Alice Munro, but perhaps because his book is so traditionally conceived as a balance between biography and formal and thematic analyses, the radicality of her work is in danger of disappearing.
For reasons that deserve investigation, Mary Pratt has become an icon of mainstream contemporary art in Canada, rarely compared or associated with anyone but other Realists such as Jack Chambers or Alex Colville. Yet we glimpse the further import of her work when Smart quotes at length from a remarkable description of her visual thinking that Pratt gave in 1985. "I've always wanted to work in film," she suggested to a rapt group of McGill University students as a beginning to a vivid description of what she might do in this medium. Images blend, as do their meanings:
... then you'd see Christopher out fishing, and he would catch the fish and dash it on the stones, and you'd see the blood again. So you're always bringing realism ... into symbols so that everyday situations suddenly become the symbols.
Pratt's finished works are so defined that we can easily overlook the fluidity of their inception and connotations. The Art of Mary Pratt is a stimulating examination of her achievements, one that may spur others on to lift Pratt from her critical isolation and think of her work alongside that of more overtly radical Canadian artists concerned with the presence of objects and their representation.
