Mary Pratt’s Love Affair with Vision brings beauty and insight
From Atlantic Books Today #98 Fall 2023
Autumn in Atlantic Canada is all about light, colours and the shades of darkness offering contrast. Autumn embodies the concept of letting go beautifully while maintaining a purpose, a cycle, much bigger than the season. As the Atlantic provinces are known for their beauty, it should not surprise anyone that talented artists like Mary Pratt, Laurie Swim and Dianne Porter, raised in our own backyards, feature in new books this fall.
Depriving yourself of passion and creativity for the sake of raising a family and committing to societal norms, especially in the 1950s, can break a person or, if handled well, can make a person and career. It was a challenge Mary Pratt faced, and it’s documented in a beautiful book by Anne Koval, professor of art history, museum and curatorial studies at Mount Allison University. Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision tells the story of how important it is to listen to your heart.
Comparing Pratt’s art to literary masters such as Agatha Christie, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, Koval reveals the life of Pratt, and how she strived to become an artist while raising her family. Pratt used paints and layers and light to bring emotional punch to seemingly simple subjects. Koval takes you into Pratt’s rustic Newfoundland home, so you can hear her children bouncing off the wall as she contemplates the just-deserted table, and the way the light danced inside the ketchup bottle, and decided to paint it. We return to her childhood on Fredericton’s Waterloo Row, and see how that inspired a more austere image of home.
As Pratt balanced her domestic responsibilities with her desire to create, Koval weaves her tale using layers of art education with the faucets of everyday living, applauding Pratt’s ability to beautify the mundane. Her book shines light on dark constraints and casts shadows on vibrant choices, bringing forth the seminal internal light that otherwise could be confused as ordinary.
Pratt, too, proves her literary prowess through her personal journals, which are referenced throughout this book. “Sunday after Sunday I thought about light. I considered the dark,” Pratt reflects. Through her journal entries, as well as in interviews with Adrienne Clarkson, Paul Kennedy and other Canadian household names, Pratt sheds light on her shadows, clarifies her reasoning behind each subject painted, and reveals how her then-husband encouraged her to use photorealism to capture the light after she’d cleaned up the table.
What sparked her journey was an unmade bed bathed in radiant light, aptly titled The Bed. “I got this ridiculous erotic reaction looking at the bed, which had nothing to do with what you do in bed, but it had to do with what I was looking at. It was just stunning.”
While this book contains a lot of technical information regarding Pratt’s process, it is done in a way that will naturally intrigue the ordinary reader and emphasize the brilliance of the artist herself.
Koval writes: “Pratt’s painterly virtuosity is not easy to achieve, particularly using watercolour.” Arguably, Koval’s expertise with wording, research and flow offers the reader the same respect for her artistry, using words instead of paint.
While Pratt freezes the present, she inspired Laurie Swim to honour the past through quilting. In No Ordinary Magic, author Carol Bruneau shares insights on Swim’s quest to have quilt art recognized as an art form comparable to painting and sculpture. Bruneau writes that in her early days, Swim received little recognition for her work in part due to the struggle to categorize the art, with a debate between “craft versus fine art versus fine craft art.”
Art, for Swim, was not only valued in the piece itself but the process and the ability to fundraise and tell stories. Many of her pieces bring attention to tragic events, such as Breaking Ground, The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster of 1960 and Lost at Sea, 1961 both created in 2000. We learn that creating Lost at Sea, 1961, which tells the story of a Nova Scotia storm that killed 17 fishermen, was a community event that brought together family and friends of the lost to participate and tell stories in the community centre.
Bruneau walks her readers through the artwork of Laurie Swim and the meticulous stitches weaved to tell the story of past, hope and Nova Scotia through art. Swim’s quilts are much more than fabric stitched together; they are a community wrapped in a story, years frozen in time, which spark an interest in learning more.
For Swim, however, it’s more than finding the right material and methods of sewing. It’s about including important materials in the dyeing process, such as using Norwegian kelp. “Kelp absorbs carbon dioxide,” Swim tells Bruneau. “Using it as a dye source for fabrics to create these works will reference its importance.” Swim draws from nature, and her concerns about climate change emerge from the images.
The unforgettable message of all Swim’s art – about the fragile beauty of life itself and of the Earth upon which all depend – is a rallying cry, Bruneau says. The artist’s journey through process, passion and persistence is made clear.
Both books argue that Pratt and Swim have been undervalued in part because they are women. That theme takes centre stage in Dianne Porter’s Unhistoric Acts: Inside the Women’s Movement on Prince Edward Island. It’s a memoir of sorts of how she went from dentistry to feminist activism, but Porter includes the stories of other unsung heroes of the the Island’s women’s movement.
Pratt, Swim and Porter each carved out their own presence to stand beside the male view as equals. “My goal, for many years, has been to change the blindness of male chauvinism to include women’s perspectives, their lives and priorities, and to give us both a chance to become better, to share the burden, and to be true to our time,” Porter writes in her book. “When I see the world my granddaughters will grow up in, I know we have made great strides.”
Porter shares that in her elementary school in the 1950s, she became known as “the girl who said no” after she yelled “No!” at a teacher who planned to strap her and several other children. She wasn’t yet ten years old, but she passionately rejected corporal punishment in a speech to the principal. No more children were hit with the strap.
She moved to P.E.I. in 1971 to take her first job as a dental assistant and brought that attitude with her. She soon met her husband, Peter, a fellow dental graduate and a few years her senior. They married two years later.
When setting up their own practice on P.E.I., the Porters took practical steps toward equality such as paying their staff above industry standards. Porter’s activism increased in 1979, when the mother of three took a position on the province’s child care facilities board. She served until 1986, helping to create programs that provided better childcare, allowing more women to work. This brought her to the centre of the Island’s women’s movement.
She tells more of that story with profiles of people such as Ruth Lacey (founder of the Appin Road Children’s Camp for at-risk youth and their families), Kathleen Flanagan (advocate for early childhood educators) and Dianne Hicks Morrow (driver of the Island’s Women’s Network and Women’s Festival).
Power, she reveals, is about more than muscles. The women she puts in the history books reveal the inner strength it takes to pursue what is right and to voice your opinions in the right manner to the right people. While all women have, and will always face, a variety of struggles, it’s their strength and determination that make for compelling stories. Whether it starts with a photo, a brush, a piece of material or a frustration, there is power in the collective of a community.
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