Freshly sliced apples, jars of red currant jelly or a fresh catch of herring - "The things that turn me on to painting are the things I really like," says Pratt. "I'm getting supper and suddenly I look at the roast in the oven or the cod fillet spread on the foil and I think, 'That's gorgeous, that's absolutely wonderful and I must save it.'" In the last two decades, Mary Pratt's paintings have been exhibited in most major galleries in Canada, reproduced in magazines such as Saturday Night, Chatelaine and Canadian Art, and featured on billboards, in cookbooks, and on the covers of books and magazines. In The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light, Tom Smart provides the first comprehensive examination of Mary Pratt's career and the evolution of her work. Weaving biographical details from her life into a detailed discussion of her paintings, Smart examines Pratt's photorealist style and the major influences in her career, including her studies at Mount Allison University with Alex Colville, Ted Pulford and Lawren P. Harris, and the domestic context that eventually shaped her work and her life. The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light features 74 colour reproductions of Pratt's major paintings, ranging from her early still-life paintings of eviscerated chickens and freshly gutted fish to her more recent mixed-media images of fire barrels and bonfires.