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Mary Pratt: Through the Window Bright

Mary Pratt
(b. 1935, Fredericton, NB; lives in St. John’s, NF)

Through the Window Bright 1997
Serigraph AP/6
Sheet: 39 x 54 cm; image: 36 x 50.5 cm
Gift of the artist, 1998
Mount Saint Vincent University Collection
1998.5

Mary Pratt is known for her photo-realist paintings of still life subjects and the human figure. The preparation and serving of meals are recurrent themes in her work. Transposing domestic life into art allows Pratt, as she says, to Aaccept the simple things as they are and derive from them the maximum pleasure they will provide.

In Through the Window Bright, the artist depicts pomegranates in a glass bowl bathed in light. Her rendering transfigures the fruit, heightening its symbolic association with death and rebirth. “Pomegranates are rough and quite irregular. These weren’t. They were a bit textured, but remarkably perfect and brilliantly red. The most beautiful pomegranates I had every seen.”

Mary Pratt received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from MSVU in 1998. She received her BFA in 1961 from Mount Allison University, where she studied under Alex Colville and met her future husband, the painter Christopher Pratt. Pratt has work in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, and others across the country. She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and a Companion of the Order of Canada.

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