Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Christopher Pratt
Summary
John Christopher Pratt (December 9, 1935 – June 5, 2022) was among Canada's most prominent painters and printmakers. In addition to a body of highly acclaimed paintings, prints, drawings and writing, he designed the flag of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Pratt was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 9, 1935. He first started painting watercolours in 1952 and won the provincial government's Arts and Letters Competition for his piece titled Shed in a Storm. He initially studied pre-engineering at Memorial University of Newfoundland in the autumn of 1952 before relocating to New Brunswick the following year to study pre-medicine at Mount Allison University. However, he quickly became interested in Fine Arts, especially painting. He was encouraged to paint by Lawren P. Harris and Alex Colville.
From 1957 to 1959, Pratt studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. During the summers, he returned to Newfoundland to work as a construction surveyor at the American Naval Base at Argentia. The training he received in precise measuring was applied to his paintings. In 1959 Pratt returned to Mount Allison University to complete in 1961 a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During this period he began to make silkscreen prints. The early screen print Boat in Sand, 1961 in the National Gallery's collection was produced at this time and included in the Gallery's fourth Biennial Exhibition. The praise it received from the biennial jury launched Pratt's career.
Pratt's subjects included landscapes, architecture, and occasionally figure work.
I have a profound sense of the power of ordinariness, and of ordinary things ... I mean ordinary in the sense that this is a person, place or thing that has nothing going for it but the fact of its own existence, the fact that it is....
In making prints, Pratt worked from studies to the silkscreen, using abstracted collages.
In 1961, Pratt accepted the position of curator at the newly opened Memorial University Art Gallery in St. John's.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.