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From dramatic landscapes and weathered fishing villages to the simplest sights of day-to-day life, there’s something bewitching about Canada’s east coast. And nothing captures its soul quite like the art soon to be exhibited at Toronto’s Mira Godard Gallery.
Between Nov. 16, 2024 and Jan. 11, 2025, Yorkville’s top gallery will showcase Atlantic Light — an exploration of light and shadow in Canadian art.
Featuring the works of five renowned artists, including the late Alexander Colville and late former husband-wife duo Christopher and Mary Pratt, you’ll encounter masterpieces that helped define a generation of Atlantic art.
“They were uniquely trained at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University in an approach to Realism, a way that suited their interests in finding and interpreting subjects on Canada’s east coast, especially its qualities of light, that were mystical and transcendent,” writes Tom Smart, art curator and former director of The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.
Through a uniquely east coast lens, artists such as Colville and the Pratts blend aspects of still life with magic realism to create a movement characterized as Maritime Realism.
Having met at the Fine Arts program at Mount Allison University, east-coast-born Christopher and Mary Pratt trained under artist and teacher Alexander Colville, an inspirational figure who encouraged their artistic abilities. Married in 1957, the Pratts remained together for over 30 years before separating in 1990.
As a married couple, the Pratts lived in rural Newfoundland, surrounded by the landscapes and everyday scenes that inspired much of their work. Whether depicting icebergs at dawn, somber skies over still water or domesticated scenes of illuminated clapboard walls or jam jars in the sunshine, light is central to the couple’s compositions.
“In the works of art featured in this exhibition, light and shadow are the actual characters in these artists’ visual poems,” writes Smart.
The Pratts’ desire to capture the ever-changing nature of light on canvas (and their uncanny ability to do so effectively) helped catapult the pair to fame.
Showcased in national and international galleries over their lifetimes, Mary and Christopher Pratt were also honoured with the Order of Canada — as was Alexander Colville.
“I say over and over again that I am ‘a lover of light’ – this is especially true of the way the effects of light bring out the dignity and occasional magic of ordinary things,” Christopher Pratt once said.
Although the Pratts and their contemporaries tried to recreate the magic of light and shadow within their works, their techniques and styles remain unique.
“[Christopher] Pratt depicts things as filtered through the sieve of memory and sensibility. Not as they are, then, but as, in his opinion, they should be. Stripped of detail. Shorn of texture. Pratt’s images are refined to a crystalline crispness, so sharp they seem to be able to cut,” writes Ray Cronin, author, artist and CEO of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
Analyzing Mary Pratt’s technique, Tom Smart describes how the artist “fills her interiors and still lifes with light that is direct, radiant and overwhelming to such an extent that it stimulates full sensual engagement with her subjects.”
In the “Atlantic Light” exhibit, visitors to the Mira Godard Gallery can expect to see some of the Pratts’ most exceptional works of art, including a collection of screenprints, watercolour illustrations, mixed media pieces and oil paintings.
Admire the otherworldly light captured in Christopher Pratt’s “Distant Fire: Stairway at Cape Anguille” painted in 2000. “With its cool geometry, its perfect angles and lines, its bare minimalism, is no depiction of reality. Rather, it is an idea and a memory, a poetic image that contains a world,” writes Cronin.
Pause at the carnal beauty of Mary Pratt’s masterpiece, “Threads of Scarlet, Pieces of Pomegranate” painted in 2005 shortly after the couple’s official divorce.
Mary Pratt’s emotional turmoil at the time is palpable — as can be seen through her use of light and colour in the composition. “(It’s) much more dramatic than most of her earlier work with its torn flesh and juices spattering the tin foil, looking for all the world like blood,” writes Cronin.
Showcased alongside the Pratts, works by Tom Forrestall, Rockwell Kent and Alexander Colville will also captivate visitors.
Pieces such as “Morning”, painted in 1981, offer a beautiful example of Colville’s ability to capture light and shadow and is a must for anyone visiting the exhibition.
Visitors can enjoy the Atlantic Light exhibition at 22 Hazelton Ave. until Jan. 11, 2025.
