After the Cold War: Argentia Approach, 2008

Pratt knew Argentia intimately. It was a landscape steeped in memory. In the late 1950s, he worked there as a student surveyor to help pay for art school, living nearby in the Placentia area and sketching in his spare time. His family had also been involved in the base’s early construction. These personal ties shaped not only his connection to Argentia, but also his future artistic approach to the site. “We were environmental artists without knowing it,” he wrote. “Pinpointing coordinates, striking lines as straight as sight.”​​​​

Pratt regularly returned to Argentia both in person and in his art, drawing not from observation but from recollection, imagining scenes that never occurred and resurrecting atmospheres long since erased. His depictions are less documentary than pensive: spaces emptied of people, but not of presence. Structures stand as quiet monuments to a past no longer visible but still deeply felt.

These images do not reconstruct history so much as suspend it. As he wrote: “My images are restorations of a kind. Like art, restorations cannot be reality; they are abstractions, voids: forts not under siege, their dungeons without prisoners; old rooms with no leaks, no draughts, no memory of pain; icons without belief.” His images of Argentia—once a bustling place—bear the trace of what has been lost but not forgotten. In this way, Pratt’s art is less about recording the world as it was than about preserving its traces—a reflective space where memory and absence coexist.

This artwork is particularly significant for its rare, dynamic portrayal of the site. In After the Cold War: Argentia Approach, a sense of movement enters Pratt’s otherwise still world: a plane comes into view, as if to land. But the moment is fiction—Pratt’s imagined return to a place already lost to time. The work is less about physical reality than about longing, absence, and the ghosts of history. Through his Argentia paintings, he transformed a decommissioned military site into a landscape of remembrance. “These weren’t superficial things,” Pratt wrote. “And these aren’t superficial connections.”