Christopher Pratt b. 1935

Pratt has never been in the business of drawing on nostalgia for his paintings, nor trapping viewers in sentimental reveries of years gone by. He has an acute sense of time, however, and also of the places and customs in which he was raised and has always lived. What he has done in his paintings, time after time, is register those places and his insights about them through the filters of his own mind and imagination. The shapes are his, the colours are his, and the atmosphere is his. We recognize the subjects, of course, but we see them as he has seen them -- with the eye of a poet.

Lighthouse Door, as its title emphasizes, is a concrete and specific thing, but the likelihood is that it is a composite of many lighthouse doors that Pratt has seen and registered up and down Newfoundland and along the coast of Labrador. He abstracts the specific, in many similar cases, to arrive at the general – the platonic version of a lighthouse door. It is a quintessential image, clean, arrested in time, and as pristine as all lighthouse doors once were.