Mary Pratt and me

I have four books about Canadian artist Mary Pratt, but my favourite is the one I'm reading now by Anne Koval.  It is the kind of biogrpahy I would love to have written about me.   How the personal life is so mixed up with the art, and how a woman with a strong creative need has to really believe in herself and continue with determination if she is to be seen and taken seriously as an artist when there is a large family in her life.

I learned many things about Mary Pratt in this book.  One was how she believed the expectataions of her time to marry young and have a family.  Born in 1935, she was 22 when she married Christopher in 1957.  By age 30, she had four children.  

I like the Koval biography because it talks about how Mary managed to do it all.  She took care of her husband who was quite moody.  She took care of the children.  She hosted her in-laws nearly every weekend.  She seemed to have a beautiful home.  And, all through that, she participated in art exhibitions.  Although she eventually had a room of her own, her early work was made in various rooms with a portable easal and a rolling cart with her paints on it.    

Salmon on Saran by Mary Pratt

Mary Pratt came to Kenora to speak in 1991.  The event was sponsored by Visual Arts Ontario and was hosted by the Lake of the Woods museum.  The museum invited artists from the region to put on an exhibition of local art.  I remember making a needlebook from small sections of knitting patterns sewn to felt pages for the show.  I wanted to point out that the knitting language (k 1 , p 1, k 1, p 1) is a secret code that mostly only women understand.  (When I find an image of Needlebook, I will edit it into this post.)  

My friend Barbara worked for the museum and she invited Mary to stay overnight at her home on the lake.  Barbara also hosted a dinner for Mary as well as the VAO people who accompanied her.  I remember helping Barb with the meal and attending it. It was lovely. What an honour.

At the talk she gave the next day, Mary Pratt spoke about how feminism helped her to be seen.  In 1975, she was curated by Mayo Graham into an exhibiiton at the National gallery of Canada entitled Some Canadian Women Artists.  Feminists saw psychological meaning in her paintings of fish cut open on tin foil, and fruit in glass bowls and jars that although Mary might have perceived a darker underlying meaning, she says that she chose these subjects because of how sensuous they were.  In her talk, she said that it was the surface of things that she was in love with, and that she didn't really take deeper meanings into consideration.  She wanted us to gasp when we looked at her work because of the beauty of it.

Cod on Foil by Mary Pratt

I remember her standing upright in a dark dress, quite frail actually, with a microphone and her slides projected on a screen behind her.  She sat beside me both before and after her lecture.  During the refreshments we continued our visit and I told her that I had four kids too.  She asked me if I was an artist and I gushed and babbled about the solo show I was to have that fall in Thunder Bay.  I was in such awe of her.  I was 39 at the time, and she was 65.  She told me she wanted to buy Needlebook.  I said that I would give it to her.

She gave me a word of advice.  "Always photograph your work when its finished. Have large transparencies, not just ordinary slides taken.  Find a professional photographer who will take care of these things.  Pay the money, because when they want to write a book about you, they will need good images, and this is how you will have them."  

I continue to follow this advice. 

After the symposium, I mailed her my needlebook.  I also sent some slides of my work so that she could see them.  She had a hip replacement that summer and her reply didn't come for several months.  I've framed her letter to me and it hangs in my studio.