Christopher Pratt:
Life & Work

By Mireille Eagan

Christopher Pratt: Life & WorkBy Mireille Eagan

Chapter

Spring at My Place, 1985

shadows of trees on a white siding house with pine trees in the background

The side of Pratt’s Salmonier home was a subject he returned to repeatedly over the course of his life. This west-facing wall became, for him, a kind of stage. Pratt described it this way: “A wall becomes a screen on which light—sunlight or streetlight—projects a play. The west-facing wall of the house we have lived in for thirty years is such a wall, and the play changes with the season and time of day.”

Spring at My Place captures this “play” at its most distilled. The wall is pared down to essentials, a plane of white cut by angles of shadow. The subject is light itself—the fleeting period when the season tips toward renewal, made permanent on canvas. Pratt writes of his relationship to this structure: “It isn’t challenging—it is already art. The shadows narrow as the sun goes down, and the crisp white boards are glazed in gold and rose and blue.”

The painting resonates with other works that explore the same motif. In March Night, 1976, the wall is bathed in artificial glow, emphasizing how easily atmosphere shifts our sense of place. In Wall Facing West, 1980, the same side of the house appears, but here the background reveals a glimpse of ocean and grass—a landscape not normally seen from the banks of the Salmonier River—hinting at a dream of elsewhere, imagined from home. In Fall at My Place (Some Shadows on My House), 2004, Pratt revisited the subject. His own shadow enters, arms crossed (as in his Mount Allison University self-portrait)—acknowledging the artist’s presence in the act of looking. Together, these works reveal the persistence of certain images in Pratt’s imagination and his ability to draw infinite variation from a single, familiar site.

This attention to his own house places Spring at My Place within Pratt’s larger cycle of what he called “Places of Memory”—roads, buildings, and interiors that he revisited across decades. The wall of his home became an anchor point for him, a key place in his personal geography. By returning to it season after season, Pratt showed that memory and meaning reside not only in distant landscapes but also in the walls that hold the rhythms of the everyday.

Here, his works are also in conversation with the paintings of Mary Pratt (1935–2018). Where Mary turned her gaze to the kitchens, the tables, and the rituals of daily life—transfiguring them with light and intimacy—Christopher focused on the austere surfaces of architecture, distilling the drama of shadow and season. Together, their practices suggest that the home itself can become a profound site of meaning.

painting of turkey wrapped in tinfoil, shining

Spring at My Place reflects Pratt’s philosophy that art begins in the simple act of seeing—that even a single wall, observed with patience, can reveal multitudes. It shows, plainly, that his enduring gift was to look where others might not.

Christopher Pratt:Life & Work

Spring at My Place, 1985

Gallery

Christopher Pratt:
Life & Work