Style & Technique

Throughout his career, Pratt moved fluidly between media. Ideas developed in a silkscreen might reappear, transformed, in an oil painting—or vice versa. He described his process as immersive and cyclical, drawing on folders of sketches, poems, photographs, and notes, letting one idea spark another. This cross-pollination gave his work both formal consistency and emotional depth—a lifelong unfolding of form and meaning, structured and still, figurative and abstract at once.

Silkscreen printing, one of the most demanding image-making processes, involves layering multiple stencils—each representing a different shape or colour—by hand. “I especially liked the flat, uniform surface and the continuity that distributing a single colour with a squeegee throughout the image gave to the finished work, and the way each individual print grew in distinct stages,” Pratt wrote.”

Art is Not Reality

“Pine’s Cove, Strait of Belle Isle: Bright sunlight, high wind, light on the torn water, translucent ice, fluorescent green, a million diamonds sparkling at once...there is a beauty, a grandeur, a cathedral magnificence about it all that trumps, makes trivial concepts of ‘art’—paintings, music, sculpture, writing. It is enough within itself; it wants no celebration, needs no commemoration: it just is.”

Christopher Pratt described his style as “littoral”—existing in the space between land and water, between reality and imagination. Its echo of “literal” was deliberate—a linguistic reflection of Pratt’s fascination with how form and meaning intertwine. For him, art was never about replicating the world. It was about interpreting it—constructing something new shaped by memory, mood, and meaning. “I make paintings about, not of, a place,” he often said.

Pratt was precise, even poetic, in how he built each image. His reverence for form extended beyond his canvases—it shaped how he moved through the world. He paid attention to wind, waves, compass points, the shifting angles of the sun. He believed deeply in the majesty of place, and in art’s inability to fully capture it.

When the composition of the first painting, Blue Hills, West of Burgeo Road, 2014, felt too predictable, too mechanical, Pratt determined that the size of the canvas itself was the issue. He scaled the work up using a pencil grid, transferring the image to a larger format for a second version: I Dreamt I Owned a Cabin on the Road North of Burgeo. It Looked Westward to the Blue Hills of Couteau., 2014–2017. The changes are subtle but significant: a roadside pole anchors the space, the rock formations shift, and the tone of the sky is transformed. The image evolves, echoing Pratt’s belief that painting was a process of discovery.

At a time when Canadian art was increasingly turning toward conceptual and abstract modes, Pratt offered a counterpoint—one rooted in discipline, reflection, and restraint. He demonstrated that Realism could be introspective, psychological. His paintings don’t replicate the world, they reimagine it. They remind us that art is not reality—rather, it is something stranger, self-sustaining, and, perhaps, more enduring.

Not What, But How, We See

At first glance, Pratt’s works appear precise and orderly, but a closer inspection reveals the truth: they never tell us the whole story. Beneath their clarity, presence and absence press against one another. Someone should occupy the room, but it remains empty. A road stretches forward, but often into darkness. For Pratt, art was not simply about depicting a scene—it was about shaping the act of seeing itself. Windows, doors, and windshields function as structural supports, directing and anchoring our gaze. What he offers is not a straightforward vision of the world, but a meditation on how we look, and on what inevitably escapes our sight. This disciplined approach distinguishes Pratt within the broader field of Realism.

In particular, the window underscores his preoccupation with separation—between viewer and world, inside and outside, known and unknown. In the early fifteenth century, artist and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) argued that a painting should create the illusion of a real, three-dimensional world. The frame, he suggested, should act as a window onto reality. Pratt draws on this idea—but turns it inside out. For him, windows don’t just reveal; they can reflect, obscure, or mislead. A window might offer clarity, but it might also withhold. It serves as both threshold and barrier: framing the world beyond while containing the space within.

In paintings such as Station, 1972, a pane of glass meant to admit light instead becomes a dark mirror, reflecting the room. “A night window is a corruption,” Pratt said. “Something that is meant to admit light and let you see out becomes a reflection of your room, of what you already know.” Glass, in this context, ceases to be a portal and instead begins to question what we truly see.

Windows in Pratt’s interiors are not passive openings, but charged spaces—bridging inside and out, presence and absence. In Basement with Two Beds, 1995, a narrow strip sky can be seen through the upper third of the window, evoking both a sense of entrapment and the faint possibility of escape. In Half Moon and Bright Stars: My Bedroom in September, 2001, he captures the precise moment when moonlight, fog, and treeline align through a three‑panel window. The balcony rail outside echoes the foot of the bed inside, forming a quiet symmetry between interior warmth and exterior mystery. One year later, in Love in Late Summer, 2002, the same window appears but with the blinds drawn. “It’s about being ‘in’ the room,” Pratt noted. The focus shifts from landscape to furnishings, from what lies beyond to what lies within.

As his practice evolved, Pratt’s use of windows shifted in tone—the domestic window gave way to the windshield. In works like Black Pickup, 1990, this is made direct. Yet in Driving to Venus: From Eddie’s Cove East, 2000, the windshield guides us forward, as night “snaps around” the car—a phrase Pratt used to describe the enveloping darkness.

His drawings often took weeks of painstaking work, the model’s presence essential to test the play of light and ensure the figure interacted convincingly with its environment. These paintings reflect Pratt’s refusal to sensationalize or impose identity, treating the model much as he treated houses or landscapes: measured, self-contained. The result is a series of early nudes—statuesque, idealized forms that “admit no decay or imperfection,” closer to the symbolic than the personal.

In the 1980s, perhaps in response to critics who noted his figures’ stiffness, or following his own evolving interests, Pratt’s approach shifted. His nudes became more direct, more openly erotic. Working again with local women, he explored a candid register of the artist–model relationship. Some works lean into eroticism, such as Summer of the Karmann Ghia, 1998, in which the model (Donna) sits beside Pratt during a road trip, her ease accentuating the image’s sensual charge. Other images, such as French Door, 1973, show her standing nude behind a glass door—aware of being observed, and looking back.

When Pratt turned to the nude—erotic or otherwise—his images reflected the dynamics of a male artist depicting a female subject within a heterosexual framework. This becomes particularly clear when his work is viewed alongside figure paintings by Mary Pratt (1935–2018). Donna—who worked in the Pratt household as an assistant, babysitter, and frequent model—appears in the work of both of them.

In This is Donna, 1987, Mary depicts her gazing directly outward, confronting the viewer. The painting was based on photographs taken by Christopher at Mary’s request. At this time, Donna had returned to the Pratt home after a turbulent period, marked by a complicated relationship that ended in disappointment. “She was miserable,” Mary recalled. Here, the act of looking becomes triangular: Mary looks at Donna as Donna looks at Christopher (and, potentially, with anger at men more broadly), and we as viewers are drawn into that charged exchange.

By contrast, in Blue Bath Water, 1983, based on photographs Mary herself took, Donna appears entirely self-contained. She is absorbed in bathing, seemingly unaware of the viewer. “It was very important that the model not be looking at me,” Mary explained, “because I wanted people to be able to look at her.”