To engage with one of Pratt’s paintings is an exercise in wonder; how did she come to such a vibrant interpretation from the seemingly mundane?
To gaze upon Mary Pratt’s work is to come face-to-face with another world, one that is brighter, more keenly observant, and more knowing, for embedded in the fractal structures of her oft chosen subjects: glass, aluminum, and plastic wrap, are reflections of time and space. To engage with one of Pratt’s paintings is an exercise in wonder; how did she come to such a vibrant interpretation from the seemingly mundane?
A keen observer of her world and how it was transformed by light, Pratt employed photography to capture those instants, slices of time served up using her projector, where she interpreted her myriad reflections. Her paintings are a marker of the subject’s location and of its fixed temporal nature, each painting held forever in one moment, and therefore one particular experience of illumination. This keen observer is the subject of Anne Koval’s biography Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision.
Koval, who’s interest in Pratt started as an academic exploration, but which became a passion project, saw something remarkable in those impressions, no less than the reflection of the artist herself, a symbolic and metaphoric but sometimes literal expression that showed the intimate connection between Pratt’s life and her paintings.
Much of Mary Pratt’s painted world serves as a marker of the traditional spaces that were the dominion of women, both the physical and the literal. This included the furniture, the tools and dishes used to prepare and serve food, and the chores, but also the transcendent space where women were responsible for the transmission of culture and values alongside the more practical and tangible aspects of childrearing. The motion of the family itself was also her purview, maybe more keenly observed because of the absence of people in so many of her paintings, see The Bed, 1968, and Supper Table, 1969. This reality, Pratt’s reality, allows for a reading of her paintings as both literal and metaphorical.
Koval communicates how much of Mary Pratt’s efforts went into keeping house, raising children, and deferring to her husband and his own artistic ambitions. Often too tired, otherwise occupied with the dominance of children’s needs, and lacking space and time to work, Pratt’s chosen medium, Kodachrome film, allowed her to capture luminescent moments in her home and freed her up from having to work in that moment. Her subjects, the mundane and domestic, became elevated and enlightened subjects under her paintbrush — where hot dogs, eviscerated chickens, and gutted fish assumed new and glorious roles. Some paintings, like those featuring the labour-intensive jellies, serve as documentaries of gender roles and are the ambrosia of cultural traditions passed down from mother to daughter, see Jelly Shelf, 1999, and Fruit Cake, Very Dark, Very Rich, 1993.


Pratt was not unaware of the feminist movement, nor was she apart from it. Koval includes an excerpt of a 2013 interview with Michael Enright, where Mary Pratt relates her relationship to feminism:
“I’d read Betty Friedan and I’d read Germaine Greer and so on, and I thought, well — who doesn’t know that … We knew we were playing at being Doris Day — you know yellow, yellow, yellow. It wasn’t what we really were — and we all knew that — but we all marched down the aisles, pretty dresses and so on, all that kind of thing. And the marriages didn’t last, of course, because none of us were doing the real thing. It was just ridiculous.”
In her own way, she challenged the societal view of women, elevating the quotidian existence in the kitchen and illustrating Pratt’s own power over her domain as something valuable and worthy of attention. But Pratt’s artistic expression expanded in the 1970s, where she faced the challenge of painting the female form, the challenge being the controversy of women painting nudes at all. Pratt’s first nude, Girl in a Wicker Chair, 1978 had a controversial reception when it was featured on the cover of Saturday Night in the same year, with public complaints that her work was pornographic.
Pratt took on other subject matter too that defied the apparently comfortable and pleasing colours and themes of her reflections, with Service Station, 1978, and Dick Marrie’s Moose, 1973, the raw carcasses of moose, in brutal reds against the utilitarian garage or fresh snow are unsettling. This unsettled nature is further explored by Koval in Pratt’s wider works. “The presence of a haunting aspect is present in Pratt’s still-life painting.” With Pratt suggesting that “People will find out that in each one of the paintings there is something that ought to disturb them, something upsetting. That is why I painted them.” Her works then are not the aesthetically and superficially pleasing paintings that people might assume them to be, distracted as they might be with the technical proficiency. Symbolism is often present, blood, death, separation, and life among them.
Anne Koval’s Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision, with its high-quality reproductions in gorgeous colour tones, is a stunning presentation of a Canadian artistic icon.
Anne Koval’s Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision, with its high-quality reproductions in gorgeous colour tones, is a stunning presentation of a Canadian artistic icon. Each chapter is crafted around a period of the author’s life, exploring Pratt’s life in function of her paintings in that period. Inter-chapter studies that focus on one painting offer a visual punctuation, where Koval portrays Pratt’s personal experiences, successes, and often as not, disappointments and tragedies as the tones from which the artist draws in creating her evocative works; see Eggs in an Egg Crate, 1975 which is a poignant exploration of the loss of her three children, and Threads of Scarlet, Pieces of Pomegranate, 2005, which is emblematic of the end of her marriage to Christopher Pratt.
Koval’s presentation of Pratt’s works gives the impression of a collection of landscapes, with each painting a documentation of the artist’s own life, in which she transmitted her essence through brush strokes and colour palettes, imbuing her work with her experiences as a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist.
“It was a love affair with vision. A real love affair with vision.” ~ Mary Pratt
Anne Koval is Professor of Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at Mount Allison University. She is the author of Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision, Whistler in His Time, and the co-author of James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth. She has written on Anna Torma for the Textile Museum of Canada and her writing on contemporary art has appeared in several edited volumes, including Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts, More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women, and The Radcliffe Line and Other Geographies: Sarindar Dhaliwal, which includes a series of ekphrastic poems by Koval. She has curated exhibitions at the Owens Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Banff Park Museum, and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, which included the work of Ed Pien, Merle McMaster, D’Arcy Wilson, Diana Thorneycroft, Aganetha Dyck, Barb Hunt, Jeannie Thib, Janice Wright Cheney, Cindy Sherman, and Sylvia Plath.
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (October 3, 2023)
Hardcover 9″ x 7″ | 320 pages
ISBN: 9781773101729
Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.