New book explores Christopher Pratt's enduring vision of Newfoundland and Labrador
Open-source online bilingual publication from the Art Canada Institute examines how the St. John's artist transformed place, memory, and everyday experience into some of Canada's most iconic images
TORONTO, Oct. 20, 2026 /CNW/ -- Today, the Art Canada Institute (ACI) releases Christopher Pratt: Life & Work, a now online art book by curator and scholar Mireille Eagan. Available for free in English and French, the new publication explores the life and work of one of Canada's most influential artists, renowned for his precise and haunting images of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Christopher Pratt (1935–2022) transformed the everyday landscapes, buildings, interiors, and objects around him into meticulously ordered paintings and prints. His art captures a world undergoing profound change while exploring broader ideas of place, memory, and the passage of time.
Written by Mireille Eagan, curator of contemporary art at The Rooms in St. John's, Christopher Pratt: Life & Work traces the evolution of Pratt's distinctive visual language and considers the experiences, places, and ideas that shaped it. From his relationship with St. Mary's Bay to his exacting approach to composition, Eagan reveals the complexity beneath the apparent stillness of his images. "Pratt used precision not simply to record the world around him, but to transform it," says Eagan. "The places he painted become charged with memory, absence, and change, and that tension is fundamental to the enduring power of his work."
A distinctive vision
Pratt carefully constructed his compositions through proportion, geometry, light, and surface. Roads disappear toward distant horizons; buildings stand isolated against expanses of land and sky; boats, rooms, and ordinary objects are rendered with remarkable precision. Human figures are often absent, but evidence of human presence is everywhere. The resulting images occupy a space between the familiar and the enigmatic: recognizable places and objects can feel strangely suspended or unsettling, inviting viewers to imagine what has happened--or is about to happen--beyond the boundaries of the image.
Painting Newfoundland and Labrador
Born in St. John's in 1935, Pratt witnessed enormous changes to Newfoundland and Labrador and its communities over the course of his lifetime. Rather than presenting an idealized or picturesque vision of the landscape, he turned his attention to the environments of contemporary life: highways, houses, buildings, boats, and coastlines.
"Christopher Pratt made us look differently at the places and objects that surround us," says Sara Angel, Founder and Executive Director of the Art Canada Institute. "His paintings are extraordinarily precise, but their power lies in what extends beyond what we can see. Through seemingly ordinary subjects--a road, a building, a stretch of water--he created images of place and memory that have become an enduring part of Canadian visual culture."
An enduring Canadian artist
Over a career spanning more than six decades, Pratt became one of Canada's most recognized painters and printmakers, with works now held in major public collections across the country.
Christopher Pratt: Life & Work offers a new look at this familiar body of work, revealing how Pratt's approach evolved over the course of his career and how his images responded to a changing world. Through Eagan's close examination, the book provides new insight into an artist whose work has profoundly shaped how Newfoundland and Labrador--and ideas of place more broadly--have been represented in Canadian art.
Christopher Pratt: Life & Work joins a growing list of titles that are redefining Canadian art in a contemporary context. ACI's Canadian Online Art Book Project--which is an open-access digital art library, available in English and French, free of charge--continues to expand, with more than seventy titles released to date. Learn more by visiting https://artcanada.com/books/online-books.
For media requests or for interviews with:
- Mireille Eagan, author of Christopher Pratt: Life & Work
- Sara Angel, Executive Director, Art Canada Institute
please contact: [email protected]
About Mireille Eagan
Mireille Eagan is curator of contemporary art at The Rooms in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. She has curated more than 150 exhibitions, individually or as co-curator, including Christopher Pratt: The Places I Go (2015) and the nationally touring retrospective Mary Pratt (2013–15), as well as the Terra Nova Art Foundation's Collateral Project (2013) at the 55th Venice Biennale. Eagan was the project lead, editor, and author of Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador (2021), which won the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association's Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and an Honourable Mention for Outstanding Research from the Canadian Museums Association and the Melva J. Dwyer Award.
About Art Canada Institute
The Art Canada Institute is the only national institution whose mandate is to promote the study of an inclusive, multi-vocal Canadian art history to as broad an audience as possible, on a digital platform, and free of charge in both English and French, across Canada and internationally. To accomplish this, ACI works with Canada's leading cultural institutions, art historians, curators, and visual culture experts, and is dedicated to the creation of authoritative original content on the people, themes, and topics that have defined Canadian art history.
To learn more about ACI and to access our free digital library, please visit us: artcanada.com
SOURCE Art Canada Institute
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