Deer Lake: Junction Brook Memorial, 1999

In Deer Lake, Pratt balances celebration and elegy, engineering triumph and environmental grief. The painting stands as a powerful testament to Newfoundland and Labrador’s history, an open invitation to look, to remember, and to consider what we gain—and lose—when we harness nature. Once a lively salmon stream, Junction Brook was dammed in the 1920s to feed the Deer Lake powerhouse. By the late 1990s it had dwindled to “a miserable trickle,” Pratt recalled. His painting bears witness to that vanished watercourse. While he was working on the painting, he wrote: “I may call it ‘Junction Brook Memorial’ if I decide to be political. And actually, that says it all.”

Like many of Pratt’s later works, this painting emerged from his drives across the island. Pratt and his then-wife Jeanette frequently drove past the power plant, on the way to the Fine Arts School at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (now Grenfell Campus) of Memorial University in Corner Brook.

This work became a milestone in his career, admired for its monumental scale, luminous contrasts, and balance between the lived environment and the architecture that shapes it. When describing this painting, Pratt wrote (echoing the phrase taught to him at Glasgow): “Art is not reality, but often reality is art.” For him, interpreting his experience of the dam cast up a complex feeling that he “struggled to describe.”

Yet, despite giving it a specific name and location, Pratt claimed, “My places don’t exist. What did exist was the strange feeling I always get from seeing water exit from a building with that force and volume.” The painting “proceeded from that wonder we share at the immense power behind dams and containment in pen stocks and the fury of its release, like a wild horse breaking the gates.” The bridge railing in the foreground holds back what Pratt calls “implied chaos,” while beyond it, the dam’s furious outflow hints at both nature’s power and its subjugation.